About the Artist
Sarah Taylor Moore
*Bio*
I was born on June 14, 1982, in Macon, Georgia. My great-grandmother was a well-known portrait artist there, and both my parents were bohemian, creative types. My father was especially passionate about rock and roll, and Southern music of all kinds, so I was raised on the Allman Brothers and classic blues. I completely believe the adage that music comes from the South. There's something about Southern soul and the raw intensity of Southern music that's unlike anything anywhere else on the planet, and it's something I was immersed in from the time I was wee.
I spent most of my teens and early twenties in Colorado, with my mom. She has an amazing eye for detail, and composition. An incredibly gifted artist, she expressed herself mainly through design, and I loved living in such beautiful, ever-changing surroundings. Ambiance affects people on a deep level, even a profound one. When you're surrounded by beauty, you feel cared for, at home. It's healing, soothing, inspiring. Moods are instantly elevated, and people will chill out and begin to enjoy themselves and appreciate each other. As a product of that realization, visual art has taken greater precedence in my life more and more as I've gotten older~ I won first place in a district-wide art contest for all 12 grades when I was 13, and started to gain interest in painting in high school. I was drawn to the concept of being able to convey my inner world in a way people could understand intuitively.
More than anything, over the course of my life, I've learned to express myself authentically. When I was little, I danced ballet and sang loudly to anyone who would listen. At 15 I was convinced I was a frustrated rock star, and I spent hours at the piano teaching myself to play. I kept mad journals full of poetry, songs, sketches, musings, observations and interesting characters. I wrote for and edited the yearbook. I spent an incredibly amazing year working for a communications-training company that valued unadulterated exchange with others more than just about anything else. People are really my first love. I believe in our inalienable right to a fulfilled life, that some form of individual expression is mandatory, that beauty is a basic human right. As I've gotten older, it's become clearer and clearer to me that painting is the most lucid and accessible way for me to convey my perspective. It goes beyond words. I've still got a great love for the written and spoken word, but art has the ability to go beyond the hours it takes to explain something, and just get straight to the heart of it. The arts have been seen as a luxury too much, or even something only truly appreciated and understood by the elite few. I disagree. Art is imperative, because it expresses something undeniable, something so powerful and honest that it demands recognition and reminds us of who we are and what we really feel. It's confrontational by nature. It's also universal, the language that goes beyond cultural boundaries and societal niceties, and speaks directly to the soul. Those who are called to create it are expressing something incredibly personal, yet they become a voice for pandemic experience. Everything I've ever painted really happened. It's a freeze-frame of an experience, somewhere between my outer and inner realities. All of my work has a lot of emotion poured into it. Oftentimes, the emotional content is different than you'd guess at first glance. Penetrating it takes a true willingness to look deeper. My goal as an artist is to capture the life in a moment, to bring people an experience they can just jump into. I strive to engage people on a sensual level, and an emotional level as well.
...I hope to bring you an experience that lives and breathes.
*Artist Statement*
"Culture is the biology of ideas." - Saul Williams
Musicians and artists are just documenting what's happening in any given moment, and reflecting back what they see and hear. It all gets thrown in the pot~ the nuances in language and humor and style that you pick up depending on when and where you happen to be located. Location is really key. Landscapes are key, and I think that's a huge part of how cultural subtleties wind up happening. Architecture is based around it, and I think it affects people's moods and modes of operating more than is immediately obvious. You can feel it in someone if they grew up where it was always cold. Likewise, you can feel it if somebody grew up in the hot, wet South. Or the West. The West will always be wilderness, it can't ever really be conquered or tamed. It exists just on the edge of reality and completely wide-open possibility.
I'm a Southern girl by blood, with a passionate love for the Rocky Mountains, and the spirit of the West. That perspective pervades my painting, but I aim to create something accessible enough for you to connect with personally. If you can connect to a piece of my art on an emotional level, then I feel like I'm doing my job.