Maggie Taylor
Reluctant optimist
2010

Name: Reluctant optimist
Brand: Maggie Taylor
Price: 1700 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Edition of 15 Other Editions: 15 x 15" Edition of 15- $3,200 22 x 22" Edition of 10- $5,000 36 x 36" Edition of 9- $9,000 After completing her prodigious series of illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass, a project spanning more than three years, Maggie Taylor continues to create whimsical surrealistic photomontages using her signature technique – a process she's pioneered for more than twenty years. The inspiration for the work is personal, societal, and intuitive. "For the last three years, I primarily focused my creative energy on my series of Through the Looking-glass images: Alice, the Tweedles, Walruses, Carpenters and all. Even before that, I had been collecting daguerreotypes and other antique photographs of girls who looked like potential Alices for years to prepare for the series. When the book went to press late last year I breathed a sigh of relief and started to open other images to work on. But, one day last spring I opened the Alice folder on my Mac to see what other girls I might have that had not been included in the book project. It turned out I used all that I had, no extras. So for some reason, I felt excited about taking a few of my favorite girls and putting them in a new image. As I started to piece the image The girls together, first I had 5, then 6, then 7…and before I knew it I wanted all 22 girls from the book in there. The working title of the image, as I rearranged the figures for weeks, was Girl Power. I think it said something to me about women in 2018, even though these girls are looking at us from the mid-19th century. They project a kind of strength and resilience, and a dreamlike attitude. Meanwhile, I have been working on a few still life images, and other things that start off as still lives but morph into something else. An egg on a table wound up being a little egg character in a landscape. A pear on a table takes on a new role as a beetle’s cottage. Three women are covered with zodiac tattoos; a girl holds up the world. I have no idea what I am working on next, but I take one image at a time and see where it leads me. Many, I know, have ties to my own life stories and even current events." – Maggie Taylor

Creator:

Maggie Taylor (1961, American)

Creation Year:

2010

Dimensions:

Height: 8 in (20.32 cm)Width: 8 in (20.32 cm)

Medium:

Archival Pigment

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

2010-