November 2023 - Taintor Davis Child

Taintor writes: "I was born into an arts’ friendly home, and as a child took a great liking to moving the brushes or pencils, inks and paints to an inner music that connected my heart and hand. I really enjoyed experimenting with colors, shapes, textures and design –got further educated in a High School Visual Arts program and Studio Arts in College and began a lifelong conversation with the language of Visual Art making. Half a century later, I think of my painting as a meditation in action and a kinesthetic and visual response to feeling and listening, my work is a call and response to this life. “My conversations with paint as I make paintings tell me something new all the time. I think that I paint to find out what/who I am.”

These circular based works (often called mandalas, or radial designs, expanding from a central focal point into 4-12 or more directions) work naturally to give design to Concepts such as the Elements of Nature, Processes of Life and other Spiritual Experiences. Arrangements and relationships between colors, shapes and textures allow for infinite possibilities that I can work with to distill and express the themes I am exploring. I am not looking for a depiction of the concept, instead I am going to an inner place of experience and curiosity in order to appreciate and express it’s energy. To move into the act of painting in order to see something in a new light is exciting to me. For example, I asked “What does water feel and look like drawn inside a square shape using my pre-selected palette of intentionally cool and complementary colors, and What are the shapes, color, energy, textures and movement of the energy that I experience when I draw water? What is water telling me today?” With these questions in mind I reiterate my physical experience of water with the reverence I have developed into a painted radial design and a mandala is born."

-Taintor Davis Child

Making Marks Studio Rollinsford, NH