The Work of Artist Maggie Taylor

Looking through the website From the Desk of, which I featured earlier this week in my post entitled Working Spaces, I happened across the desk of artist Maggie Taylor, and was happily reminded of the first time I came across her work on the cover of the literary magazine Copper Nickel Issue 11.

I was immediately stunned by the dreamlike imagery (which usually doesn't do much for me) and the surreal poses of the animals and people featured in Taylor's work. I hurried to the internet to find out more about Taylor and her work. Spookily, one of the little girls who appears numerous times in her pictures looks to me like me (although my family members do not see the resemblance, but I do, I DO.) (See said little girl below.)

Check out Maggie Taylor's website to see her renderings of the Alice in Wonderland classic story, plus other examples of her ephemeral work and her unusual obsessions, including headlessness, houses on fire, fish as ornaments, wings on things generally unwinged, people partially obscured or fading, floating and rising, and more.

Learning more about Maggie Taylor, I discovered that she lives with her artist husband Jerry Uelsmann in Gainesville, Florida, where my family and I spent some very happy years when our children were tiny and my husband was doing a post-doc.

Check out her work and her books, which can be found at her website. (Note that she collaborated with Florida poet Lola Haskins on the beautiful book Solutions Beginning with A.) Here's a brief explanation of Taylor's process, which uses Adobe Photoshop CS for collage technique.