2020-2021 was a year of radical change on a global and personal level. As of December of 2020, I, Taylor Yarmie, started my first residency in Downtown Los Angeles, three months after moving cross-country. As a young oil painter in the internet revolution, I find most of my work’s importance is in medium and source imagery. Oil painting is special to me because it becomes a ground to interpret and analyze. My thesis, titled “LI(F)E”, completed in May of 2021 is a body of work that recreates images from vintage LIFE magazines. The disruption of color and translation through a brushstroke’s speed and thickness became a platform to contextualize the way I think and talk about life today. My hand in the paintings is a key aspect to keeping each work’s uniqueness. By treating each painting differently I avoid creating a formula, which keeps my work alive.

My work takes inspiration from painters like Jenny Saville and Jean Michelle Basquiat. These two painters, being my main influences to pursue painting are almost polarized. Saville’s work being refined and representational; compared to Basquiat whose work is manic and seems to create his own visual language. Since the aesthetics of the two artists range so drastically the ability for me to explore the scale between them becomes infinite.

My work is neo-expressionistic. The imagery can almost always be identified, but it is clearly non-representational. Colors become a way to explain or contradict an implied idea. The work often reads as slightly offetting because of variations between color and treatment of the paint. Since my thesis work is complete, I am currently working on a more pattern-based abstract collection of work to help ground my connection to texture and color. Creating abstract work after completing a representational collection allows me to make space for ideas to grow.

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