I’m Kelly L. Taylor. I rescue vintage things. They find their way into my still life paintings to tell stories – sometimes dramatic and dark, sometimes light and fun. Recently I’m having great fun with vintage toys and sock monkeys. This series captures the on-going adventures of two sock monkeys walking in the park, sharing a banana split, munching popcorn on movie night, or just monkeying around. 

I love how these paintings prompt viewers to tell me their personal sock monkey stories – how and when they acquired their own sock monkeys and their experiences with them. How as child they slept with that sock monkey so much that it was flat or how your sister and her husband were childhood friends with matching sock monkeys who reunited as adults, got married, and now their sock monkeys sit together on the mantle. 

When I was a kid, my Aunt Rosemary made sock monkeys. She had this magical room, half hidden behind an accordion door, and if you peeked in there you could see sock monkey parts and sock monkeys in various stages of completion. What’s your sock monkey story? 

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, A&U Magazine