Alison Taylor spent much of her career steeped in physics and computer programming, designing software for machines, before she turned to art. The Halfmoon Bay artist has just opened her first juried show of artwork at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre last week titled The Physics of Being, and it’s evident she has not left physics behind. She always knew she wanted to study art and took what she cheerfully says must be the longest time ever to study part-time at Emily Carr University. It took 18 years. Still, the inspiration didn’t come.
“I’m so linear,” she told the Coast Reporter. “I was so used to working with equations where there’s a right answer. I was artistically constipated.”
That all changed when she took a course from Gibsons artist Todd Clark who gave week-long summer courses that included many demonstrations in which he showed how he worked without a plan, adding and editing along the way. Intuition entered Taylor’s work.
“It was life changing,” she said. She painted for a group show in Vancouver called Piece of Mind in which all of the art on display made mental health statements. One of her paintings depicted a huge weight hanging on pulleys and as the weight lifted, so her depression lifted. It was to be the first of the images from physics texts that indicated a basic principle with an emotional or psychological overlay from the artist. Taylor’s paintings in the current show describe concepts; for example, the painting Focus depicts an abstracted lens focusing on a point. That of Friction shows a block sliding down a steep hill generating the kind of friction that could make a person angry. Potential depicts the steep downhill slide of an object that will eventually propel the object uphill again. The paintings can be viewed with an understanding of the psychological intent or be viewed simply as a pleasing abstraction.
Taylor will be talking about her art at a Meet the Artists session at the Arts Centre (5714 Medusa) on Sunday, Sept. 2 at 1:30 p.m. The other show in the gallery is Paintings from my Travels from Paula O’Brien and Bruce Edwards and they will give a joint demonstration of the plein air experience.
Taylor also hopes to be part of October’s Art Crawl. Meanwhile she is still creating software, in this case to help other artists deal with the business side of their passion.
