B
orn into a family of professional musicians, Morgan
Hill abstract artist Les Taylor was surrounded by the
sounds of music from an early age. She helped in
her parents’ music store while growing up, became
a guitar player in the singer-songwriter tradition, and played
in a band when she was twenty. Her life of creative influences
also inspired her to pick up a paint brush six years ago.
Les is the younger of two children born to Hal and Rell
Taylor of Walla Walla, Washington. Her parents moved the
family to the Bay Area when she was two years old. In 1957,
her father opened Hal’s Music Center in downtown Los
Altos. Starting out as a record store, it expanded to include
electronics, musical instruments and band equipment.
According to Taylor, the full-service store was a huge draw
to musicians during the music renaissance of the sixties and
seventies until they closed the store in 1978.
“There was a soundproof guitar room called the ‘listening
room’ where people would come and try out guitars,” she
recalled. “Such amazing Bay Area bands and they would just
play together in the room.”
Taylor graduated from San Jose State University in 1980
and went on to have a successful career in Leadership
Development in which she said she “helped people find their
best selves.”
Though she had long thought of trying her hand at art, it
wasn’t until 2013 that she took an art class with her eighty-
nine-year-old father at the Center for Spiritual Living in San
Jose. Taylor recalled the teacher not emphasizing technique
but encouraging students to freely express themselves all the
while stressing “there are no mistakes.”
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
“She would say that art has to be evocative, it has to
suggest something,” Taylor said. “I view every painting as
different, never the same thing.”
When asked, Taylor can’t point to a specific period
or artist as an influence in her art, but enjoys the
experimental and unorthodox style of avant garde art.
Ultimately, she gravitated to abstract art. She often
experiments with various household items to apply layers
of paint and then creates interesting textures as she scrapes
away the surface. Taylor said that “it’s not as important
what I paint on the canvas as it is what I take off.”
Taylor’s style is reflected in her fundamental approach
to painting. Unlike many artists who struggle to free them-
selves from the impulse to paint representationally, it is
more challenging for her to be held to a structure. This
approach is evident in her work, whereby there is a free
expression of vivid colors and mostly heavy applications.
In the end she manages intriguing contrasts and depths
that she said has people telling her “there’s always an
opening in your art.”
Taylor retired in 2016 and when her father passed away
two years ago she decided to leave her San Jose home to
find a place in a more rural setting. She chose a comfort-
able home in the hills of Morgan Hill where she was able
to set up a roomy and well-appointed studio in the garage.
A prolific artist, sometimes finishing as many as six pieces
a day, her studio is teeming with finished paintings with
more to come; of that we can be sure.
Les Taylor’s art can be viewed on her Facebook page
titled Les Taylor: Taylored Expressions.
june/july 2019
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