After graduating from CalArts in 1995, Taylor first moved to downtown Los Angeles, where he nurtured a significant rapport with his neighbors. Taylor's depictions of friends, local personalities, and passers-by are joined by street scenes inspired by his global travels. The result is a gallery of his extended community, which he commemorates in images that capture each subject's humanity and personality.
Taylor based this canvas on a photograph he took from inside his car of a man asking drivers and passengers for help. In the source image, the man’s sign reads “Anything Helps.” By removing the text and depicting the individual larger than life, Taylor monumentalizes his subject, presenting him in the grand scale of historical portraits. The work’s title,
Too Sweet, may refer both to the See’s Candies store in the background and to the character of the depicted individual.
Likely inspired by Taylor’s trips to Africa, this work
is based on a photograph published in a 1999 National Geographic article on African marriage rituals. The painting reflects Taylor’s voracious mining of print media that began in college where he studied journalism and cultural anthropology. “I used
to be a journalism major,” Taylor said, “so I have a habit of going through the newspaper—not that I want
to get bogged down and get depressed, but because that’s the way I was taught.”
In the early 1990s, Taylor began treating commonplace items like cigarette cartons, butter containers, and cereal boxes as painting surfaces. Often he would trade these works with fellow artists or sell them to his neighbors. Executed quickly, these small-scale, painted objects function like sketches, providing an inexpensive way for Taylor to work out compositional and thematic ideas and to experiment with language, text, and abstraction.
