An artist friend, Anna, told me – making resolute eye contact – that I need to electrify the apparently drab color palette I have allowed myself to succumb to. We were having an “art day,” which means we get together on her covered patio with Molly, her incredibly cute dog, chat for awhile, have a coffee, spend way too long getting our works space and materials set up, and try our damndest to advance our current projects while sort of cheering each other on. Anna was flinging colors around on a silk canvas in wide bars so vivid you could have mistaken it for a black-light luminescence poster we all know from our teenage years or stoner friends. I, five feet away, was scribbling blue ink into a tiny patch of bare canvas and diluting it with medium-heavy titanium white, carefully planning which color will come next, wincing at the surface like a math problem. I wasn’t having any fun with that, and predictably, I found myself staring at the colors an hour later and wondering how I had come up with such a stereotypical, elementary pairing of orange and blue without much else going on. Anna was right, I think, as she hands me a white wine spritzer (choice Art Day drink – or we are just women-around-thirty). My color capabilities have become flabby. Glug.
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Man with drapes is called man with drapes because there is not another good name for it. A man stands, picking up some drapes. This was one of the first of my “progressive painting” experiments, in which I worked primarily in charcoal, then liberally applied paint, then alternated back to charcoal, and so forth in a pattern cycle that eventually became “constant revision” and changing of position, color, etc. I searched for a surface full of movement, uncertainty, but also shape and form. Making art this way, it is impossible to know when to stop revising or beginning a new cycle for the piece. At a point, I believe the art tells you when to stop. If the artist feels it is unfinished, then it is up to the viewer to finish it. 
Dad is the hunter. Mom is his cheerful accomplice. Before the Cities, I accompanied Dad, chasing pheasants I could rarely mark, using Mom’s multicolored shotgun. Once, I tracked a whitetail with Dad. We crawled yards that November day, dragging our bodies along scrub. Dad cut a crablike path leading to a perfectly triangulated shot at our resting game. Long after, I felt like a weakling for popping the rifle trigger and aiming way low, blasting the South Dakota prairie in the face to spare the doe her life. Her coal eyes had fanned pity in me; I couldn’t take her, snuff her out. I don’t know if he was aware I pardoned the whitetail, spoiled the kill. Now, we were driving west to track larger game. The Sioux call them “wapiti,” Dad told me. Mom called our truck “White Magic Bus,” with I-90 west miles tumbling behind us. 
Enjoying a glass of 4 PM champagne after landing at a wind-beaten beach bum bar full of sandy cracks, all-state auto plates, and live, maybe authentic Cuban guitar. Of course the first thing we do after landing is head straight for the shack-studded cocktail beaches – in this case, Siesta Key. 
Zach Taylor Art 