Paintings by Trés Taylor are featured in the exhibition Birdsong, at American Folk Art & Framing (AFA). The exhibition opens online on Tuesday, June 7. Gallery viewing begins Thursday, June 9, and runs through Friday, June 24.
Birdsong. Trés Taylor, artist
Paintings created for Birdsong were inspired by a short poem by 13th-century Sufi mystic poet Rumi. “Birdsong celebrates the music that is all around us which, when heard properly, will trigger the inner connection to the great Mystery,” Taylor says. “The gifts of Nature, the music, the smells, the tastes, the sights, are all waiting to wake us up. Birdsongs can do that if we really listen.”
A self-taught painter, Taylor pinpoints his awakening to a visit to Alabama in 1999. He was living in San Diego and working as a biochemist then. “A friend of mine and I traveled around the state visiting the folk artists who were well-known at the time,” Taylor says. “I was deeply captured by their art.” He met artists like Mose Tolliver, Lonnie Holley, Jimmy Lee Suddeth and Charlie Lucas, but it was Georgia artist R. A. Miller who set him on his own artistic path. “His home was a magical place that was informed by primitive folk art,” Taylor says. Miller encouraged Taylor to go home and start painting. “R.A. Miller let the genie out of the bottle,” adds Taylor, who paints and carves on tarpaper and uses a router or Dremel to draw lines he could not otherwise create with a paintbrush. To give his paintings a “ceramic” look, he also uses house putty and goldleaf.
During the last two years, Taylor took advantage of time spent close to home to refocus creatively. “I found myself having so much more time to just be,” he says. Without the festivals he was accustomed to attending, he could slow down and “soak in the moment,” he says. “This is actually what my art is about and yet it was COVID that made me practice what I often would preach.”
Music of the Swamp. Trés Taylor, artist
Taylor and his wife live in Selma, AL, and have committed themselves to community art projects, including a series of 20 murals in communities throughout the state’s Black Belt. “For each town that I go into, I try to learn as much about the town’s unsung heroes as I can for inspiration, and then I create a fable and a mural with the community,” he says. Nine murals have been completed so far through the initiative.
“When experiencing Trés’ paintings, there does appear to be pure joy flowing through and around them,” says AFA gallery owner Betsey-Rose Weiss. “His rich, bright colors are uplifting, and his subjects, be they animals, landscapes or people, appear to be caught in sweet communion with their surroundings.”
American Folk Art & Framing is located at 64 Biltmore Avenue in Asheville. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. For more information, visit AmeriFolk.com or call 828.281.2134.
