The Patterned Beauty of Colossal Painted Heads

Taylor Mckimens’ 'Stoic Youth' puts a colorful spin on Greek sculptures.

by Antwaun Sargent

October 4, 2015, 1:00pm

All images courtesy of the Hole NYC

If figurative painting is about being seen and establishing a unique understanding of visibility, then Taylor McKimens’ latest show, Stoic Youth, breaks all the rules. Taking inspiration from two Greek sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, McKimens’ painted the same two heads 20 times.

“I rarely ever take such direct inspiration from other art,” McKimens tells The Creators Project. “What I was drawn to has a lot more to do with stoicism than being a Greek sculpture. Most of those sculptures seemed to be experiencing all emotions simultaneously. They seem to reflect whatever you wanted to project onto them,” adds the artist, whose past works focus largely on depicting morose comic book-like figures set in darker, futuristic renderings of the suburban American West.

“Drawing and painting heads and portraits is a really repetitive task in the first place,” says McKimens of figurative art in general—androgynous rendering of the sculptures in McKimens’ paintings is the artist’s way of rethinking how art has evolved throughout art history. With each portrait McKimens changes the colors, size, and shape of the figures, while the original physical features of the men the artist depicts remain the same. The backgrounds of the works are abstractions that aren’t found in traditional figurative painting.

“Another benefit is that [the repetition] changes the way people talk about with the paintings. It takes them away from ‘who is this?’ and focuses more on how they were painted,” explains McKimens. “The face is still there with all its loaded connotations and emotions, but now it is essentially an abstract painting. People talk mostly about paint and color while looking at these. I’m excited about achieving that while still including a strong figurative element.”

The artist's textured abstractions draw from Southwestern influences and color palettes while the heads pull from McKimens’ pop culture roots and take on McKimens' signature comic book quality. “This is still very much work that is born out of my same southwestern roots,” says the artist, a native of Winterhaven, California. “It still deals very much with the issues connected to that story. Like many other artists from small towns without museums and galleries I learned how to make images by looking almost entirely at illustration and print,” adds McKimens.

Despite the show's duplication, it exposes freshness, much like Warhol's copies. “Art is communication, says McKimens. “We’ve been focusing on the linguistics aspect of that communication in the art world for long enough. It’s about time to stop attempting to discover new languages and actually start saying things.”