With A Studio Full Of Sprigs And Petals, Painting Florals Is Second Nature For This Dallas Artist
“I was a messy child,” proclaims artist Taelor Fisher, who first began collecting inspirational elements in droves as a child after her preschool teacher suggested she enroll in art classes. “I was always getting into trouble for leaving things everywhere—the result of scavenging for materials,” she laughs. “Anything to bring my ideas to life.”
Today, this inherent desire to forage spills into Fisher’s Dallas studio, where piles of dried petals and leaves create a fresh, woodsy scent. Their organic shapes also inform her work. “I’m interested in how we use and reuse botanicals,” she says, “breaking them down and exploring traditions around them.”
Her oil paintings mix objects with abstraction, combining movement, color and variety to evoke an organic experience. “I love playing with ways to represent petals, branches and leaves,” she notes. “The abstraction helps me represent a bigger picture.” For Fisher, the “bigger picture” stems from nature’s positive impact on the brain. “Being surrounded by something organic can make you happier,” she explains. “It certainly has that effect on me.”
While the artist first worked as a teacher, that creative pull she felt as a child took hold, and she left the profession to pursue painting. Just a month in, the Paris-based luxury fragrance company The House of Creed commissioned her to create a print for its fragrance Floralie—an opportunity that took her around the world. “I pinch myself every time I think about it,” she notes. “It made me realize that if you have talent and drive, what you can do is truly limitless.”
A passion for nature infuses Fisher’s work holistically, as she uses natural pigments and oil paints to create an authentic adaptation of botanicals. “I love telling someone a pink was mixed using hibiscus and birch, or a green came from eucalyptus,” she says. Her palettes combine the soft hush of muted, serene colors with bold pops, each shade mixed by the artist herself.
Fisher pulled color inspiration from interior decor, 1960s and ’70s decorative fabrics and Chinese porcelain to inform her latest collection, “Happy Places,” which launched at Gregg Irby Gallery in Atlanta before showing with more pieces at Liz Lidgett Gallery + Design in Des Moines, Iowa. Featuring a mix of geometric and opaque color fields blended with abstract floral moments, the collection was driven by the practice of bringing nature in to curate our homes—not unlike Fisher’s tendency to scavenge for inspiration and fill her studio with dried petals and leaves. “Translating what goes on in my head to a canvas is so fulfilling,” she says.