James Harvey Taylor delights in painting contemporary life in his impressionistic style of loose, freely applied color.  Taylor interprets the fleeting light and atmosphere of a scene with a spontaneous brush and bold stroke, always seeking to reveal the underlying truth of the subject at hand and thus free the eye to focus on the essential element, minus any distracting minutiae.  Harbor, city coastal and landscape scenes coalesce into a rich yet subtle matrix of color and harmonious form.

James loves the vitality of paint and creates his impastos using full-bodied strokes of color, vibrating with energy, while watercolor pigment fuses like magic on a wet surface and scintillates against white textured paper.  Structures and figures are secondary elements, carefully woven into the predominating fabric of sky and landmass, creating a poetic symbiosis of pattern and color nuance.

Always in search of inviting subject matter for his paintings, James has traveled widely over the past decade searching out scenes that spark his imagination and ignite the creative impulse within.  He has drawn inspiration from the rugged out-croppings of the Rockies to the Great Lakes.  The small fishing villages and harbor towns stretching along both coasts have inspired some of his most exciting works.

Recently, James painted scenes along Scotland’s eastern coastline, which provided a rich and varied matrix of paintable jeweled landscape and architecture.  The tiny coastal fishing hamlets of St. Monance, Crail, Pittenweem and Porthmadog provided a wealth of irresistible subjects, while further inland, the bucolic countryside dotted with age-old farms beckoned.  James interprets these themes with a masterly touch honed by an intuitive sense of what is vital – the essential element that connects us to our environment and lets us feel its impact on our consciousness.

Born in Washington, D. C. in 1946, James has lived in several states but now calls Utah home where he lives with his wife Debra at the foot of 12,000’ Mt. Timpanogos in the heart of Utah’s ski country.  James received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in art from Brigham Young University in 1974, and has since studied and drawn inspiration from the likes of Sargent, Homer, and Turner.  His work has been exhibited in numerous gallery shows and is in corporate and private collections including: Western Federal Savings & Loan Corporation, Sutton Industries, Marathon Oil Co. and the Marriot Corporation to name a few.  Private collectors from the United States and abroad have collected hundreds of works of the past two decades of Taylor’s career.

Selected works have been published into Limited Edition prints and distributed across the U.S. and Canada.  James is a signature member of the UWS and is listed in “Contemporary Western Artists” by Peggy and Harold Samuels, “The Encyclopedia of Water Landscape Techniques” and “Watercolor Flower Paintings” by Hazel Soan, “Acrylic School” by Hazel Harrison, “Painting Light & Shade by Patricia Seligman, and “Utah Art” by Vern Swanson.