User:Stevieart

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Stephanie Taylor (artist/writer) Stephanie Taylor is an American artist, born in Chico, California and raised in Sacramento. She began her career in art at age 19, first in Hawaii and then in Los Angeles, as an artist and art director. In 1972, she left LA to travel in Europe, hitchhiking and living out of a backpack for 7 months, sketching and writing. Returning to LA, she attended UCLA, and graduated in 1977, with a BA in History, with an emphasis on the Economic Philosophers. She returned to making art, just as the Westside mural movement was starting. Her territory was Manhattan Beach for street murals but she soon received commissions to create murals and paintings all over LA, and then the United States. Large-scale interior installations related to and were informed by the architecture of a space. While some muralists create teams of assistants, Taylor always valued the process of making art over the end result. Her clients included Walt Disney Flagship properties in Orlando and Paris, Hilton and Hyatt properties, Bally's in Las Vegas, and cultural institutions such as the CA Railroad Museum. In the early 80's, Taylor returned to Sacramento with her husband and children.

Reflecting her love of history and a reverence for the role of location in the enhancement of identity, Taylor's research into subjects was always extensive. In 1991, the Oakland Airport Hilton commissioned Taylor to create paintings for a restaurant called "Amelia's." At the start of the project, the only reference to Earhart's flights in and out of Oakland was a tiny yellow toy plane that hung in a doorway. She began was turned out to be a six month odyssey of research. She wanted to portray the most significant pioneers of aviation who flew in and out of California between 1920 and 1940. She wanted to to recreate them as life-size figures, all together as they'd never been in real life, as if they were sitting just outside the windows on the tarmac. She interviewed Earhart's last official photographer, Albert Bresnick and talked to the Smithsonian. She visited aviation museums and talked to Earhart's biographers. In the end, she decided upon 30 figures and made the paintings.

In 1996, Taylor began research for murals at Jack London Square in Oakland. This was a subject very close to her heart as her paternal family was from the East Bay, dating back to the 1800's. Her great-grandfather was the Superior Court judge, George Samuels, in whose court Jack London appeared. Her grandfather was born in Piedmont and received his law degree from Hastings in 1905. Her mother, Theo Samuels, was born in San Francisco and raised in Oakland and graduated from Cal in 1938. Jack London had no love for Samuels and wrote a short story called "Benefit of the Doubt," where he portrays Samuels as Police Judge Witberg. It wasn't his best literary effort, and ends on a positive note, despite the antipathy that is documented in Russ Kingman's, "A Pictorial Life of Jack London."

Taylor interviewed Kingman's widow, Winny, at the famous and defunct Jack London Bookstore in Glen Ellen. Winny showed Taylor the original index card files with all of Kingman's research. Later, when the store landlord forced Winny to move her beloved bookstore, Taylor remained friends. Taylor also interviewed London's great nephew, Milo Shepard, and visited him often over the years. Finally, the murals were finished, with the added 3 dimensional elements in clay, Taylor's first experiments with dimensional murals. Sadly, the murals were destroyed by the developer who bought the former Waterfront Plaza Hotel.

In 1997, Taylor created one of the first large-scale digital fine art murals for the Crocker Art Museum. Since returning to Sacramento, she has created a remarkable number of exterior mural and sculpture projects in the region. She also maintained a schedule of solo and group exhibitions, showing with Solomon Dubnick Gallery, from 1993 to 2008.

Since then, Taylor has created countless murals and sculptural projects, from the San Francisco Hilton to abstract installations in a library. The murals began to come off the wall, and in 2004, fascinated by the possibilities, Taylor enrolled in a masters program. She explored a variety of media, from steel to fabric, and received a masters in sculpture in 2006.

Since the spring of 2011, Taylor has found a formal outlet for her love of California, travel, travel sketching and writing. As a freelance contributor to the Op-Ed section of the "Sacramento Bee," Taylor finds, researches and creates essays and paintings in a series called, "California Sketches.". Intensely interested in water issues, she has a separate blog, "Following Water in California." Taylor's website: stephanietaylorart.com.


 * Sacramento Bee Opinion Page
 * Inside Publications Sacramento
 * Sacramento Business Journal