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TAE MAGAZINE ISSUE 1

The artistic impulse cannot always be confined to a canvas that fits neatly on a gallery wall. Renaissance painters like Michelangelo decorated ceilings and sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved mountains. Some find their inspiration in city life; the late Keith Haring began creating his distinctive figures in subway stations. Contemporary artist Taylor White combines the two impulses, creating paintings on large urban surfaces. She started using traditional media, but found herself compelled to create more sizeable images. “I had become frustrated with the smallness of it,” she says. “There is such an immediacy to walls because you are constantly engaged in conversation with the surface.” White cannot remember becoming an artist saying, “The drive to create images was born within me.” Her mother saved her earliest drawings, which she made at the age of two. She was blessed with parents who recognized her connection to the art form and did all they could to support and nurture its growth. They arranged for her to take extracurricular classes to supplement the arts education she received in public school, and attended summer sessions at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. White received her advanced education at the Savannah College of Art and Design. After graduation, an advertising agency in Oslo, Norway, hired her as an illustrator. She worked there as a storyboard artist for three years. Needing a change of scenery, she travelled with a friend to Melbourne, Australia, and fell in love with the Land Down Under. She stayed as long as her visa would permit it, just under two years. Now she divides her time between Australia and her hometown of Raleigh, NC. While in Melbourne, she first started creating works in urban spaces with ILL-logic, an outdoor street party hosted annually by Shaun Hossack and Juddy Roller Studios. For one crazy night each January (remember, it’s summer then below the equator), the suburb of Fitzroy blocks off an alley and Hossack fills it with music, dancing and the creation of art before everyone’s eyes. Painters spray graffiti-like murals on the walls and sculptors install pieces too large to fit in a museum. For her first ILL-logic, Taylor White painted Ambush on Chapel Street; a group of mischievous boys lurking in a doorway. The doorway is real, the boys larger- than-life painted in black and white on a plywood cut-out. RALEIGH, NC & MELBOURNE, AU 40 TAE MAGAZINE

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