Because he grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where cities bleed into forests at every edge, Oregonian Taylor Clarke's art is deeply infused with the intersection between humanity and nature. His paintings fuse the natural world (deer, fish and cranes) with naked, tattooed women and other idealized images of the human form. One of his recent paintings captures the profile of a deer, but the animal is translucent. Its skeleton is superimposed over the silhouette of its flesh like it stuck a hoof into a cartoon light socket. The juxtaposition between the x-ray, a modern and explicitly human way of viewing things, with the natural elegance of the deer is exactly the line that Taylor Clarke walks in all of his art.
Clarke's process of painting builds upon this theme as he takes the normal bi-products of civilized life and uses them to create his work's earthy backgrounds. He layers newspapers over the canvases and paints them with brushes full of the sludgy coffee left too long at the bottom of the pot. His giant canvases are textured with backgrounds of old papers and paint and brown coffee shading long before he begins to attack the painting's subject matter.
Clarke is a talented photographer and filmmaker as well as painter. He has a stunning and varied photography portfolio for a twenty-one year old. He has filmed and directed short films and music videos for Northwest bands. One of his most remarkable videos is the one Clarke shot of himself. He documented his entire artistic process throughout the creation of one of his paintings.
The video illuminates Clarke's artistic skill and his abilities as a filmmaker. The self-shot, off-the-cuff film gives us a startlingly intimate vision of Clarke at his most exposed: during the moments of his inspiration.