Maggie Taylor

Maggie Taylor

I am very much interested in Maggie Taylor’s work.  Taylor takes photos of everyday objects and scenes, and then uses Photoshop to blend the photos together to create fantasy images.  I was first introduced to her style in high school, and I have admired it ever since.  Her work has a very fairytale-esque style that I enjoy.  She creates an incredible amount of depth with her scanogram-type style.  I know that she works with hundreds of layers per image, but they blend flawlessly together.   My two favorite series of hers are her This and That series and her Almost Alice series.  I think the most interesting thing about her work to me personally is the picture book quality of it.   I consistently get that feeling of childhood and wonder when I see her surreal images.  I also find her subject matter interesting.  I like the way she presents everyday objects and people in unique ways.  Her work reminds me of optical illusion books.   When you look at one of her pieces, you see the immediate image before you, but when you look at it for a longer period of time, you can spot the smaller different things that compose the picture such as a shell that works as a dress, or a tiny shape in the background.  Many of her pictures are also an intellectual challenge for me, because logically I know that there are photos within the image, but I hesitate to call the final product a photo.  It has a slightly more painterly and ethereal quality than a regular photograph does.  Maggie Taylor makes very convincing images, but intellectually I still know that they are impossible.  Many Photoshop artists use Photoshop to create very realistic, but untrue, images.  The way Maggie Taylor uses Photoshop she is not trying to trick the viewer, instead she is inviting the viewer to think about images in a different way.    Her work seems to emphasize childlike qualities and playfulness.  When I see people appearing in her artworks, I do not think of them as models or regular people posing for a photo.  Instead, I think of them as characters, and I can almost tell what their personality would be like.  The surrealness of the images is lively and easier to understand than many other surreal artists’ works.  Even though many of the characters within these pictures appear quite serious and posed, the emotion I get from looking at them is quite the opposite.  A different way I respond to her images is in a bodily manner.  Since her pictures appear three-dimensional, I can feel myself leaning to peek around a character to see what is behind them.  I enjoy Maggie Taylor’s work and I hope to use its inspiration to develop my own projects.