By ANDREW ATTERBURY
San Angelo (Texas) Standard-Times
SAN ANGELO, Texas — Warren Taylor considers himself a frustrated art historian.
Visiting London a few months ago, the retired Midland College art professor viewed Rembrandt’s self-portrait from 1669 and became transfixed.
A chill rose up his spine as he gazed upon a work more than 300 years old. It still spoke to him, Taylor said.
“Political and military history comes and goes,” Taylor said. “Great art always stays. That to me speaks volumes.”
Angelo State University is presenting an exhibit of abstract, complex watercolor paintings by Taylor in the Carr Education-Fine Arts Building, 2602 Dena Drive.
The exhibit, titled “Now and Then,” is housed in the EFA Building’s Gallery 193 and is open for free public viewing from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays through Sept. 25.
Taylor first used watercolors as a high school junior in his native Kansas.
His school had a minuscule art budget of $36, Taylor said. He received an amateur paint set and laid down his earliest works on the reverse side of an old sheet of wallpaper.
After high school he graduated from Bethany College in Kansas, then served in the Army Medical Corps in Germany. Taylor taught in Kansas public schools for seven years, earning a Master of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from Fort Hays State University before joining the Midland College studio faculty in 1979.
There, he instructed painting, art history and the occasional drawing course. Taylor retired from Midland College in 2011 and relocated to San Angelo.
“I’ve always loved San Angelo,” Taylor said. “It just spoke to me.”
Many of Taylor’s works contain direct references to historical passages and great paintings of the past in an abstract setting, he said. His intention is for the viewer to examine the work from the surface level all the way to down to what is so deep it’s barely visible, Taylor said.
“To me, that reflects our response to time, to the past and to present realities,” Taylor said.
In 1999, Taylor was named a Piper Distinguished Professor, an award granted yearly to 10 outstanding Texas professors by the Piper Foundation of San Antonio. He was the top award winner of the Arches Paper competition in 1992, an event marking the 500th anniversary of the famed paper company.
Taylor was the only American watercolor painter selected to represent the U.S. in the millennium competition sponsored by Winsor-Newton Company in 2000.
He is a member of the National Watercolor Society, American Watercolor Society and Watercolor USA Honor Society, and has had works displayed in more than 250 exhibitions of American watercolor painting, including in such places as Nanjing, China, the Tokyo National Art Center and St. James Palace in London. Taylor also has juried the Rocky Mountain Aqueous National and exhibitions in Phoenix, Denver, Richmond, Virginia, and Dallas. His works have been purchased for many university, museum and corporate collections.