Meet Karen Taylor

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Karen Taylor a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Karen, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.

I was the weird awkward kid, geeky, hand me down clothes, last to be picked for teams at sports. I always felt I must have been off school the day they explained the rules. I never knew how to fit in, how to do things the “right” way.

Now I’m grateful for that. If you never know what the rules are meant to be, you never worry about breaking them. I always have a hundred ideas bouncing around in my head, I put them down on canvas to make space for more and to see what they would look like. I’m never concerned that they might not fit with whatever people might want, I’m concerned that I’ll lose some of them before I get to them.

Recently I‘ve also been working on installations in our studio gallery space for fun. I’m a painter, but I also have experience of other mediums: printmaking, drawing, photography, paper crafts, digital manipulation. It has been a creative outlet that helps me think in a different way, giving new ideas that I can bring back to my day to day art practice.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m an abstract artist, my latest work is typography based. My source materials are my favourite words: quotes, well known phrases, often song lyrics. I fit the font, colour and composition to the text.

I choose words that speak to our humanity, words about how we strive to keep it and about how others try to take it away. About what makes us human: our flaws and our strengths. Words about how wonderful we are and how gloriously ridiculous.

I’m mildly dyslexic, not enough to cause me problems, but enough that I’ve always been fascinated by the shapes our words make, how different fonts are like different accents.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Play is important to me as an artist. I have always dabbled in other art forms, it’s good way to experiment with colour and composition in different ways that you can bring back to your main practice. Not everything I do has to be geared towards the finished paintings that I exhibit. My work has evolved and changed throughout the years, and all of the major developments have come from playing with a different material.

I’m Scottish, so I was exposed to a variety of accents growing up, I’m endlessly fascinated by the different voices, different dialects and registers that people use to express themselves. For me the beauty of the language that we use is not just my topic for painting, it is a great love that sits side by side with my love of painting.

I have been very lucky that I don’t suffer from a fear of failure. It’s not that paintings don’t work out, plenty of canvas ends up in the garbage. It’s that I see every painting as an experiment, a “what would happen if?” I used to be a scientist, it’s how my brain works, I learn something from every painting, especially from the disasters. Often the worst paintings lead to my biggest breakthroughs. I worry more about not trying something, not seeing what would happen if I gave it a go.

Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?

Maybe I should answer this with a question. What makes you so sure that you know your strengths, are you the best judge?

Many of us ignore our biggest strengths because we think they are things that everyone can do, we take them for granted. For instance, I used to draw every day, I never gave it a second thought. I stopped for a couple of years, and then realised that it wasn’t so easy any more, I had lost the skill. I eventually got it back, but I had thought it was some innate ability that everyone had. I’m really good with my hands, good at conjuring up interesting things from scraps lying around. I’m good at putting lots of disparate thoughts together and coming up with a great idea for an installation or a painting. I didn’t value any of this until recently, I didn’t think it was anything special, until other people pointed it out. Now they are skills that I make sure I use every day.

Maybe you have people skills, maybe you have physical strengths, maybe you think in a different way to other people, but do you discount that because it’s too easy for you?

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.KarenTaylorArt.com
• Instagram: @KarenTaylorArt

Image Credits

Karen Taylor
Rob Croxford
David Harcombe