We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Taylor Stoneman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Taylor, looking forward to hearing your stories today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
Taking risks is inherent in art practice! Each new painting that I begin holds a risk of failure and disappointment. I think this reality exists for every artist but I feel it quite strongly as an emerging, self-taught artist. Though my confidence as a painter is rapidly growing, I am still regularly surprised when a painting comes out as I envisioned it in my head. And then I often will delay beginning the next painting because I fear I cannot possibly create something as good as my last. Facing that fear requires gumption, requires entering my bravest mindset so I can risk the current self in order to find my next self, that one that emerges with each new painting.
Art mirrors life in that way though, doesn’t it? Any journey toward finding out more about the self requires risk taking. If we are not taking risks, then we are stagnant. We are not standing close enough to the edge. Painting brings me to that edge.
Taylor, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers?
I am a self-taught painter living and working in Berkeley, CA. An outdoorswoman born in Arizona and now residing in Northern California, my oil and acrylic paintings are rooted in these two spaces and the land in between: covering scenes from the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the roiling California coast. My work examines the meaning of wilderness and its imperative role in our lives, both within biological and societal ecosystems and as a solid place for our bodies and hearts to land. Known for my painterly and impressionist style, I paint loosely and with emotion.
It would be most technically precise to say I have been painting regularly for three-and-a-half years, but the greater truth is that I’ve been a creative my whole life. I grew up taking dance, architecture, theater, and art classes. In college I picked up photography, quickly moving it from hobby to a business of sorts when I offered to take senior photos for friends. Then, I went to law school. Partly because I had an idealist dream of working in international law, and partly because I did not know what else to do, I went straight to Cornell Law School in Fall 2013 after graduating from the University of Arizona that May. Moving from the desert of Southern Arizona to the lush beauty of upstate New York was eye-opening and vital for me at that stage in my life. I craved something different environmentally than I had thus far experienced and accomplished that by moving across the country to a completely distinct biome. At Cornell, I challenged myself intellectually, met my best friends and partner, and graduated in 2016 having landed a job at a large law firm in Washington, D.C.
But while in Ithaca, I also stopped nurturing myself with creativity. My camera sat in my closet in favor of other more physical stress-relievers like running and yoga. The trend continued in D.C., then in Los Angeles when I moved for a federal clerkship, then in San Francisco when I moved to work as a commercial litigator at a more prestigious (and more stressful) law firm in the financial district. I often worked 12-hour days and came home exhausted and empty. Somewhere along the line, pure ambition was no longer sustaining, and my mental health suffered,
It was at this crux that the pandemic began. Sitting at home in March 2020, I impulsively purchased a set of watercolor paints and brushes. I spent the summer of 2020 experimenting with watercolor, then in August bought an intro set of acrylic paints. Working with acrylic completely invigorated me! I was able to manipulate the paint more easily and began creating paintings that matched what I saw in my head, which totally unlocked who I saw I was or could be. I felt an opening in my conception of self. I created an Instagram account to start sharing my paintings with friends and family.
As the calendar turned to 2021, I decided to quit my job at the law firm with no new job yet lined up. I didn’t quit because of art, but I do think creating art had given me permission to value happiness in a bigger way, and to realize that I was not happy at a corporate law firm. I took four months off, spending much of that time traveling and painting the desert landscapes of Eastern California, I camped in Death Valley and plein air painted in Joshua Tree. When I began a new remote legal job as counsel at a D.C.-based nonprofit called American Oversight, I did so with clear eyes about the importance of art and the outdoors in my life. I specifically chose that job, which I still have today, because of the flexibility it provided me to have time to embrace who I was outside of law. I hoped to continue to expand my art practice while at the same time working on legal issues that were more meaningful to me.
Fast forward to today, and my art practice has grown beyond what I could have hoped. I jumped around creatively for a bit, spending much of 2022 focusing on writing and publishing poetry, another creative outlet I turned to as the pandemic closed around us. But particularly beginning in January 2023, I began to focus all of my creative efforts on painting: building my portfolio; expanding my technical skills, including learning how to work with oil paint; creating an accessible website; and selling my art online and at local markets. And through that focused effort, I can’t believe how far I’ve come! I have had three paintings juried into exhibitions at galleries in San Francisco and given an Artist Talk at one of those galleries, describing my artistic journey to a small crowd. My work will be featured in the January 2024 issue of Suboart Magazine. And I have an upcoming solo show at Arizmendi Bakery in Emeryville during the month of February 2024.
In treating my art more seriously, my art has thus been treated more seriously by others. In each individual moment it has felt like a slow build, but looking back just one year ago my practice was vastly smaller and my growth as an artist has been incredible. I’m excited for what’s to come in 2024!
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
When I first started painting, I applied the same ambitious, type “A” perfectionism to my art that had threaded through my whole life. I imagined that getting “better” at painting was a linear journey and constantly compared my paintings to those of artists I admired, lamenting the ways in which mine differed. But I’ve had to unlearn such perfectionism. The more art I view, the more I realize there is no such thing as perfect art, or even “good” art. Art is a subjective endeavor and subjectively enjoyed, and is almost never a zero-sum game. Freeing myself from the aim of perfection has resulted in more interesting ambitions and interests, and ultimately in more interesting art.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
I came to painting in an effort to discover more about the self. I feel similarly about writing: that I do not know my truest opinions and thoughts until I write myself through it, until I pour my feelings onto a page. Then at some point among the words and cramping hand, I sit back and say, “ah ha, there it is.” It is the same with any painting. I usually have an idea of where I want to go but do not clearly see it until I’m through, and once I’m through I understand why I wanted to go there in the first place.
Alongside such self-discovery, I yearn for my art to create conversation about important or hard topics—in particular, the climate is top of my mind right now. As an avid backpacker, I come home to my body in the wilderness, away from roads and buildings and human-made construction. I strongly believe the health of the earth and the environment are important markers of the health of a civilization. As a result, my paintings are turning toward examining how humans have manipulated the land we live on and how we see (or don’t see) that which exists around us. We often look past natural and structural additions to the local environment because they are so common to our present existence (e.g., telephone poles and wires, transmission lines, dams, non-native plants). In contrast, my newest paintings place these appendages and their impacts in full view, making them impossible to ignore. I enjoy thinking through themes of what belongs in a physical space, how belonging is created or imposed, which land we choose to alter or destroy and which we choose to preserve, and how we might societally and individually account for and, in some cases, reverse the impact of such alterations.
I am currently working on a series of eucalyptus paintings on linen. The paintings themselves scrutinize the torsos of eucalyptus trees, abstracted into layer after layer of peeling bark, focusing on the supple curves of each tree’s curled and multi-colored trunk rather than on the tree’s entire physical structure. Eucalypts are synonymous with the Bay Area today, but their presence here embodies a form of colonialism, transplanted from their native Australian shores to Northern California in the 1800s. Eucalyptus trees’ fast-growing and fire-prone nature, which tends to crowd out California’s native flora, have stirred debates regarding the invasive species for decades. At once they are both beautiful and destructive, containing the same nuance as much of our cultural present. I enjoy painting eucalypts because of this nuance. They feel complicated, and in some ways I feel that painting them will help me figure them out more.
Ultimately, creating art and sharing it with others is one of the best ways to find that you are not alone. I hope that by creating and sharing my own thoughts, visions, and concerns, the conversation that is inspired can bring people together and ricochet impact expansively and exponentially.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.taylorstoneman.com
- Instagram: @taylorstoneman_art