“I paint because I have to, because it is a place to hold my “self” and my love of seeing and feeling the world and all the emotions that spiral within it.”

Sunaura Taylor was inspired to begin painting by her mother, also a painter, and was home-schooled along with her siblings during her childhood education. She spent countless hours of exploration in the studio and in the library researching art history and classical techniques. Around the age of seventeen, Sunaura began exploring portraiture and the human figure. The portrait Vic Chesnutt comes from this series, portraits primarily of friends. "To me art is a search and an appreciation of that searching - this is made much more sincere to me when I begin the journey with a relationship in which there is already a strong connection and understanding." During this time, Sunaura also completed a self-portrait that captured aspects of her physical disability. Before this work, the relationship between her disability and her art had been very material. For instance, learning how she might paint with her mouth and feet or devise special systems to reach the top of her large canvases. With her self-portrait, Sunaura became interested in disability as it relates to image. She is presently studying theories on normalcy and exploring the disabled body in painting. "Painting and disability are directly related in that they both help to form the person I am. I would not be me without either - but they are also not dependent on each other. However, being disabled has colored my perspectives and interests in an infinite number of ways."

Read the article by Sunny Taylor in the Monthly Review:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/ 0304taylor.htm

www.sunnytaylor.org