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Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Work of Artist Maggie Taylor

Looking through the website From the Desk of, which I featured earlier this week in my post entitled Working Spaces, I happened across the desk of artist Maggie Taylor, and was happily reminded of the first time I came across her work on the cover of the literary magazine Copper Nickel Issue 11.



I was immediately stunned by the dreamlike imagery (which usually doesn't do much for me) and the surreal poses of the animals and people featured in Taylor's work. I hurried to the internet to find out more about Taylor and her work. Spookily, one of the little girls who appears numerous times in her pictures looks to me like me (although my family members do not see the resemblance, but I do, I DO.) (See said little girl below.)




Check out Maggie Taylor's website to see her renderings of the Alice in Wonderland classic story, plus other examples of her ephemeral work and her unusual obsessions, including headlessness, houses on fire, fish as ornaments, wings on things generally unwinged, people partially obscured or fading, floating and rising, and more.


Learning more about Maggie Taylor, I discovered that she lives with her artist husband Jerry Uelsmann in Gainesville, Florida, where my family and I spent some very happy years when our children were tiny and my husband was doing a post-doc.

Check out her work and her books, which can be found at her website. (Note that she collaborated with Florida poet Lola Haskins on the beautiful book Solutions Beginning with A.) Here's a brief explanation of Taylor's process, which uses Adobe Photoshop CS for collage technique.

5 comments:

Jessica Goodfellow said...

Really imaginative, isn't it? And she and I share a few image obsessions, houses on fire, and people behaving like birds or birds behaving like people (a sort of confusion of the boundary), both images which show up repeatedly in my poem cycle Alphabet: Fugue:.

I'm really grateful to Copper Nickel for first introducing Taylor's work to me, and of course to Taylor for the work.

Mari said...

Beautiful work, Jessica... thanks for sharing!

Jessica Goodfellow said...

Mari, I saw on FB that you wondered about her art for a book cover. Besides her own books, Maggie Taylor's work was featured on Kathleen Jesme's 3rd book of poems, The Plum-Stone Game.
http://www.amazon.com/Plum-Stone-Game-New-Kathleen-Jesme/dp/1934103039/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1311505546&sr=8-4

Anonymous said...

Man, I'm totally amazed by her work. I just found out the other day that her work was used in the opening credits of the Ghost Whisperer show.

Jessica Goodfellow said...

Thanks, Anonymous, for sharing that fact. I did not know that.