The Drawings of Al Taylor
Text by Isabelle Dervaux. Contributions by Lawrence Rinder and Lindsey Tyne. Foreword by Colin B. Bailey
Featuring more than ninety drawings and many sketchbook pages that span Al Taylor’s entire career, this book documents the artist’s important achievements as a draftsman.
This book investigates important and illuminating aspects of Al Taylor’s drawings, which numbered over five thousand at the time of his death. It includes a chronological survey of Taylor’s drawings from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, highlighting the combination of technical refinement, humor, and sensuousness that characterizes his works on paper. Stunning reproductions of the works, which were inspired by such ordinary things as tin cans, pet stains, and broomsticks, reveal the drawings’ minute details, nuanced shading, and playfully agile pencil lines. Lively texts explore how the rich and complex visual sensibilities of Taylor’s drawings resonate with that of late Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters. The book also examines Taylor’s innovative approach to process and materials, such as photocopier toner, with its intense black, and the extreme white of correction fluid. Created with equal parts humor and technical virtuosity, and informed by scientific models as well as everyday minutiae, Al Taylor’s magnificent drawings are meditations on form and structure that stand as testament to great draftsmanship.
Publisher: The Morgan Library & Museum, DelMonico Books/ Prestel
Artists: Al Taylor
Contributors: Isabelle Dervaux, Lawrence Rinder, Lindsey Tyne, Colin B. Bailey
Designer: Katy Homans
Printer: China
Publication Date: 2020
Dimensions: 9.5 x 11 inches | 24.1 x 27.9 cm
Pages: 175
Reproductions: 194
ISBN: 9783791359496
Retail: $40 | £29.99 | €37
Status: Available
Al Taylor
Al Taylor (1948–1999) was an American artist known for his uniquely innovative approach to process and materials that encompassed two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional objects. Taylor ultimately sought to expand the possibilities of vision by creating new ways of experiencing and imagining space and his work provides the viewer with an insight into the artist’s thinking and his investigations of perception across several dimensions.
All Al Taylor books