I’m Kelly L. Taylor. I make dramatic still life paintings of antique and vintage items — found, inherited, and compulsively collected — to show that life goes on for the objects that are left behind. 

A transplanted Upstate New Yorker, and former Bostonian, I’m a graduate of Guilford College in Greensboro, NC where I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a focus in oil painting and an AB in English. Active in the Triad, North Carolina art community, I exhibit work in local galleries and participate in artist collaboratives. 

“Her series of still lifes are a case in point, “full of texture and shadows, sad and happy at the same time.” A cherub gambols amid toys. A stuffed animal bunny poses with a skull. Her paintings seem to understand ephemera as treasure. There are no people represented, except indirectly, and so there are people everywhere. These are strange, unexpected communities, where the softness of life coexists with the hard and mechanical, where loss is palpable, but so is survival, and where difference becomes a risk worth taking.”

–Chael Needle