A Studio Visit With Ravenna Taylor

Here you will find a photo essay of my recent visit to the Lambertville, New Jersey studio of Ravenna Taylor.

Ravenna also maintains her own blog, Lagoon, that you can visit here.

Ravenna Taylor in her studio. Lambertville, NJ 2012.

From the artist's statement: 

Visual sensation stirs my attention to perception and thought; as emotion and thought impact senses and perceptions, my curiosity engages. My imagery derives from such observations, the dovetails and overlaps of lived experience.

My paintings chronicle my choices; to choose is to begin, to be alive, to be human. Several of these pieces began as other works I’d thought were finished, but which I turned back into beginnings. I’m calling this assembly of work “re: Vision,” to disclose the revisiting, and refer to my preoccupations with our powers of perception and thought.

I compose my pictorial abstractions to excite associations. While nature’s phenomena inform the paintings, our human nature provides the long warp on which I weave. I have some favored subjects and allusions to arrange, like Morandi’s bottles. Among them figure time, games, measures, maps, reflections and shadows. Artistic influences range widely, from Mughal miniatures to Modernism. I delight in color, harmony, patterns, and ambiguities. I construct and destroy, obscure and clarify; I celebrate choice, and our humanity.

Ravenna's work is currently on view in the online exhibition Ravenna Taylor: Re-Vision at Galerie Cerulean here.

The exhibit will be on view through April 8.