About Richard Taylor

I was raised in Southern California in a family of artists and makers. Thanks to the hyper-connectivity of the modern art world I have sold work internationally, and I have exhibited work in several galleries. My formal education was in the sciences and I took graduate degrees in physics and materials science, ultimately working as a researcher at NIST and lecturing on quantum mechanics, physical symmetry, materials properties, among other topics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My art is informed by my training as a scientist and my long obsession with painting and art history. My passion for art began as a child with a fascination with van Gogh’s implied view of color as a relative phenomenon.

Art is not created in a vacuum and the social and artistic movements of the last century provide a chorus of voices that are joined by the voices of today: Frankenthaler’s and the Washington School artists’ work on color, de Kooning’s and Serra’s work on form, Guston’s social commentary and emotional charge, the writings of Clement Greenberg, Richard Serra, and so forth are deep conceptual wells to build on, modify, distort, and transform. I explore form, color, and material as parts of a reductionist language of emotional expression. At the forefront of my work are these motivating questions: What are the phonemes or axioms of this language? How do they interact? How do we perceive these within our emotional and cultural context?

 Abstraction for me is not something that arises from a transformation of reality, although much of what is defined as “abstract art” is exactly that. In my view, this is not true abstraction (though it certainly has value and beauty); rather, it is reality transformed. Abstraction arises from reduction, distillation and reapplication. In this way, abstract art is wonderfully akin to the development and utility of scientific theory. Presently, the aim of my art is to re-utilize the reduced structures of color-language and form-language in an emotionally resonant new language.