VICTORIA TAYLOR-GORE

About

Gateway

Victoria Taylor-Gore

Soft pastels have proved to be a very fluent medium for me. The technique is subordinate to the content, so I can get an idea and follow through with it. My work depicts simplified architectural and landscape forms in a distorted perspective and seamlessly blends the pastels in smooth color transitions.

I received a BFA in 1983 from West Texas A & M University, and then in 1985 I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara for my MFA. I have exhibited my work professionally for the past 20 years ...primarily in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, but also in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, and recently in China.

Alexandra Steven's Gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe has represented my work for the past 12 years. If you are interested in purchasing my work, contact the Alexandra Steven's Gallery, but please feel free to contact me directly with any comments or questions!

I am currently teach both traditional and online classes in drawing, painting, art history and art appreciation at Amarillo College in Texas.

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Current Work

An Art Journal...My New Blog

I have recently launced my new blog An Art Journal (www.anartjournal.com) and I will be posting my most recent work there. Come visit and post your comments!

Passages 1

Passages

The series of pastels for Passages recycles long reoccurring images in my work such as; the boat as vessel of the spirit, the ladder as a means of ascent, sky and water as symbols of another world beyond this one, the house as the symbol of the self, and the road and river as a means of passage. See slide show of images: Passages 1, Passages 2, Passages 3, Passages 4, Passages 5.

These familiar symbols have been recycled and varied by illusive juxtapositions and now a contrast of areas of black and white pastel with isolated areas of color. This visual contrast of black and white next to small areas of rich color was inspired by films such as Pleasantville (1998, starring: Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, director: Gary Ross) where the use of color in a black and white world took on deeper meanings. In the Route 66 series, Victoria has used small areas of black and white in a large color pastels...in Passages the color appears in a world of black and white.

Art historian and critic Hunter Ingalls wrote about my Passages series:

That's curiously kin to the mental, imaginative distance of Taylor-Gore's imagery. Elements of nature conspire with man-made objects in relationships that convey feelings rather than factual information. In her pastels, it's a dream-like world in which our eyes drift across softly lit, sensuously hued surfaces in realms of suspended possibility.

Everything exists in a larger, symbolic context: "...the boat as a vessel of the spirit ... the house as the symbol of the self ... road and river as a means of passage," she explains in a statement with the show. Ambiguity and mystery are fundamental to the works' expression. However, the drawings allow us to follow steps in the artist's process; the positioning of things, especially in relation to light, is important.

- Humter Ingalls, Amarillo Globe News, Art Beat, January 21, 2007

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Middle House

Villages

I am currently doing a series new pastels of simple villages in a "wide screen" or elongated horizontal format. The expanded view of space gives the viewer a panoramic experience of both interior and exterior spaces, thus enhancing the "visual journey" through my work. The painted road through these villages also suggests the idea of a journey, usually leading back to a vast sky and landscape. This series is colored with the vast horizon of the Texas plains where I live, where the sky always dominates, along with the nested valleys and layered mesas of New Mexico.

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Publications

The Lore of
New Mexico

Books

I have illustrated two book covers for the University of New Mexico Press: The Lore of New Mexico by Marta Weigle and Peter White and The Algarrobos Quartet by Gerardo Mario Goloboff and translated by Stephen A. Sadow.

The UNM Press designers big winner “The Algarrobos Quartet: Four Novellas,” by Mario Goloboff and translated by Stephen Sadow, received awards at the 33rd Annual Bookbuilders West Book Show held in Oakland, California. UNM Press’s part of the press’s Jewish Latin America Series, garnered awards for designers Robyn Mundy and Melissa Tandysh. They were awarded, respectively, for exterior and interior designs, winning best all-around design for a trade, text-driven book.

Algarrobos
Quartet

"The restrained and uncluttered interior is eminently readable. The jacket suggests something foreign and mysterious, yet familiar and friendly. This design very successfully suggests the puzzles and multiple meanings that are the heart of these enigmatic novellas."

 

noted Bookbuilders West in the show catalog.

Articles

Some of the not to distant press about my work includes a Christmas Eve show at the Alexandra Stevens Gallery Santa Fe in 2004 that was featured in an article in the Albuquerque Journal. My interiors featuring the romance of Route 66 was reviewed in Southwest Art Magazine, June / 2002, The Poetry of Spaces. Sara Ford wrote an article about my work in Focus Santa Fe Magazine.

The press release for Rising Stars 2000 exhibition, Western Artists Worth Watching (9 /16 - 10 /29, 2000) states:

"She weaves her stylized objects together like a mystery novel, illuminating them with eerie lights, showing them to us from odd angles, and purposefully making them ambiguous in placement. Is that a picture or a window? ...Paths of light from sunsets, moon rises, light fixtures, candles or brightly burning hearths capture our attention and fuel our imaginations..."

 

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