The Madness of Lewis Taylor

05/07/2011 14:19

Font size:

Jake McGee

The fun of Being Dark and Grotesque

As serious and important as good art can be, if it's not fun at some point, it won't last. It's great to be all stern and pretentious about your art, but at the end of the day, if you can't make people smile (if not, you know, THINK), then you art will have little lasting power.

Enter Lewis Taylor, this month's featured artist. Hailing from the United Kingdom, Taylor's style of madness seems at first absurd and crude, yet they have a deep social consciousness.

Currently a student working toward a degree in Games Design/Character Design, Lewis says, "the past years have really helped to sculpt my own style of working, as well as interests in various fields of Art & Design. I've always been interested in drawing, particularly cartoon and caricature - but I have found that exploration into other areas such as life drawing, illustration, graphic design and even photography have helped me in my work and influences."

"I'm often changing my ideas about what career path I should take, but with every new area of interest comes new opportunities to improve my creative work as well creating new ideas, this in turn enables me to reflect on past work and improve on that too.

"I want to always feel that my style is improving, from response to praise and criticism. Working with ink vastly improved my style and I found using it more comfortable. I also believe that it is important to learn about drawing in a more traditional sense, ie. life drawing and anatomy studies. This I feel gives me a greater scope to play around with when working in a loose illustrative way. I enjoy working with other people and sometimes find solid projects more exciting."

"My drawn work is often described as dark and sometimes grotesque, and I find this to be my most favored way to work. I try to pull inspiration from several different areas, and I feel that some of my inspirations are obviously visible in my work."

"I took an interest in political satire when watching the 2010 elections in the UK. I was previously aware of artists such as Gerald Scarfe who I find to be a huge inspiration, and took great joy in looking at his political work. Looking at political satire itself made me more aware of politics, where as before I would generally ignore it or not take an interest. Since I was just eighteen during the elections it was my first time to vote, proving a perfect time to become interested in satire.

Obviously the main element of satire is the ability to take a political figure, and twist them into whatever you want them to be. I found this to be joy with figures I particularly despised. My main target with this work is to receive a reaction of any kind, with that being said I wouldn't be too interested in talking about hefty political topics stemmed from a piece of my work. But I do enjoy making people laugh, and this is what I hope to achieve with this work - I try to achieve this by having a mixture of themes. Often the depicted subjects are vulgar which I find more humorous personally, and others are less obvious. "