About Tayloe
Tayloe is a Jacksonville native, a citizen-neuroscientist and an entrepreneur. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Florida with a degree in psychology. Her art can be found in the permanent collections of Baptist Health Systems, St. Vincent’s Healthcare, and the Haskell Collection. When she isn't painting, she offers workshops through ArtSparcs, a company that develops art-based products and services to support brain health and well-being.
FIRE
Historically, poppy flowers and fire have been symbolic of both death and of resurrection. The flame of the poppy flower is a metaphor for my life’s work. I don’t want to just observe a field of poppies and risk its sleep-inducing effects. I want risk the pain of blossoming in order to wake up, for this is my life’s work, to Wake Up.
WATER
Water is the formless thing that forms; it divides Earth, determines where cultures are established, and is an integral element in all spiritual and religious traditions. It is the place to which I retreat for rest and reflection and it's also a place of barnacles, sand flies and swift currents. Growing up in Northeast Florida I have learned that a river is a serious thing with which to reckon. It can carry me safely home one day and desert me for hours on unseen sandbars the next.
EARTH
The element of Earth reminds me of my limitations, that I am very much grounded (pardon the pun) to dirt by the force of gravity and of the astonishing improbability of my existence. I marvel that for billions of years I was not alive but in this tiny sliver in the history of the universe, I am. Not only to do I get to be alive but I have the capacity to understand that one day, my body will return to the mud, to the teeming, pungent, messy face of Earth.
AIR
Perhaps this awareness is why I am obsessed with painting clouds. I’ve looked up at the sky to see electric ribbons of pulsing color and have thought how improbable the scene looked. Clouds remind me that possibilities I have not yet imagined exist and that I don’t know the whole story. When I practice awareness of my own breathing, air reminds me that I am literally connected to every living thing. I breathe the very same molecules that have been in your body. We share both possibility and the unknown in with every breath.
These elements resonate with me and yet the symbol isn't the thing I want to convey; I hope to communicate the sense of longing that these ideas stir. The longing doesn’t have a name; it is the thing I know, yet have never seen. It is the happy ache a joyful memory brings which is itself sweeter than the moment it remembers. I often feel like the thing I want to communicate is in a foreign language that I've never heard before-that poppy fields and river scenes, that clouds and marsh, are the one or two letters of a word I have stumbled upon. I listen to the longing inside and let the paintbrush respond in its own elemental language.
