Saturday, February 23, 2008

Kaplansky Love

Hi folks,
Here's a photo of my latest painting. It's hanging in a group show at the Rose Street Co-op in Burlington. Check it out on the Seven Days newspaper website.

Kaplansky Undone by Holly Rae Taylor (3'X4', 2008, acrylic on canvas)

Kaplansky is the name I've given a recurring shape in my work. It's a circle within a circle, and the two are attached and in motion. Below is the original kaplansky painting.

Yellow Kaplansky by Holly Rae Taylor (15"X 40"--approximately, 2000, acrylic on paper)

I'll be posting more photos of my artwork, including the stained glass!

ciao!
the compost maven

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3 comments:

June said...

Hey Holly,

I love the Kaplansky! In the larger size of the Original Kaplansky, I can really see the energy in their creation. They remind me of peas drawn by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Really enjoyed meeting you. I was inspired and spent a bunch of time today making some Artist Trading Cards--something I hadn't done in at least a year.

June

Holly Rae Taylor said...

June! Hi, thanks for posting. I enjoyed meeting you, too, and Rosemary, and seeing the Beebo Brinker Chronicles. Alison and I were talking later about why Ann Bannon made Beebo so violent. Couldn't she just have had all the best parts of butchiness like swagger, a love of the ladies, and assertiveness? Or was it a sign of the times they were in, where she was a victim acting out in a life forced into the shadows?

On another note, I checked out Charles Rennie Mackintosh--had never heard of him. He was prolific! It makes me wonder if it's common for an architect to branch out into lots of design forms, like furniture, stained glass, and jewelry? I only know of Frank Lloyd Wright doing that. I didn't see any peas but I did see what appears to be stylized roses, reminiscent of my kaplanskies.

ciao!

June said...

I know--the violence seemed so jarring and, well, violent. I don't know why she felt she had to go there, either. I guess it was the convention of the day--the pulp novels were amazingly popular, and if they hadn't shown lesbianism to be a dead end (suicide or abject misery being the main options for the final pages), they'd never have been published. Like letting the bad guys triumph in movies. And I guess, as you say, it would've been hard to avoid being damaged back then. Yet another reason to be glad to come of age after Stonewall and women's liberation and everything else in the '60s!

I can't help wondering about Ann Bannon. She wasn't/isn't a lesbian--well, I guess I don't really know how she identifies, but she was married with children while she was writing those books, and I don't think she's ever lived "the lesbian lifestyle." She was at the last performance that I went to, and after the talkback ended, a whole bunch of people were mumbling, "So, is she ..." I was wondering the same thing, but none of us asked her! It didn't seem polite somehow, which was weird, since there were lots of assertive women in the room!

I wasn't very clear in my Mackintosh analogy--I meant that the awesome Kaplansky looked similar to Mackintosh roses but in the form of peas in a pod or laburnum seeds. (See, I still can't say it very well!)

Junie