“I’m not particularly fond of still life paintings,” says Joy Taylor.
It’s a funny line from a painter whose work is filled with flowers. But for the artist, flowers are less subject matter than structure: a way into rhythm, repetition, color, and abstraction. Her paintings may initially register as lush botanicals—zinnias, blossoms, radiant circular blooms—but they are not observational paintings in the traditional still life sense. They are invented systems, built petal by petal from imagination rather than direct representation. Her work is part of a group show with Stephane Anderson and Laini Nemett, “Nature’s Palette,” through June 7 at Bernay Fine Art in Great Barrington.
Taylor, who has lived in Red Hook since 1987, describes nature not as something to copy but as a force in constant flux. “Nature kind of has everything and it’s superficially beautiful,” she says. “The more I look at it, the more I’m seeing the constant change that it always goes through.”
That awareness of impermanence runs beneath the dazzling surfaces of her paintings. The blooms are exuberant, even joyful at first glance, but the longer one spends with them, the stranger and more intense they become. Petals multiply outward in dense concentric patterns. Color vibrations create visual instability. Forms begin to pulse. What first appears decorative gradually edges toward the sublime.
Taylor embraces that tension. “I’m interested in making unnatural shapes and colors that remind people of nature but that are not really representative of it,” she says. Her paintings are not portraits of flowers so much as distilled experiences of natural energy: circles radiating outward, systems organizing themselves into improbable coherence.
The process itself is painstaking. Taylor begins at the center of a canvas and works outward, repeating a single petal-like shape hundreds of times. Though the forms appear simple, she rejects the idea that the paintings are meditative in any passive sense.
“It’s quite nerve-wracking,” she says with a laugh. “There’s nothing automatic about it.” Each repeated form contains tiny variations, and every mark must fit into the larger composition without losing its individuality. “I’m responsible for every inch of every bit of every painting,” she says.
That balance between control and variation mirrors the natural systems Taylor draws inspiration from. Her paintings may look highly ordered, but they resist mechanical precision. Petals overlap imperfectly. Shapes shift subtly. Color relationships create optical movement that keeps the eye circulating around the canvas.
Recently, Taylor says, color has become increasingly central to her work. In the blue flower featured on Chronogram’s June cover, tonal variations within the blues create vibration and depth, while the yellow center introduces what she describes as an “emotional impact.”
The result feels simultaneously graphic and immersive. Her work contains traces of Op Art, textile design, folk traditions, and mandalas, though Taylor cites the Surrealists as an early influence. What interests her is how pattern and color can destabilize perception and reveal something stranger beneath ordinary looking. “There’s that level of abstraction that I think is everywhere in nature,” she says, “but we often don’t see it because we’re focusing on something else besides what we’re actually looking at.”
That philosophy places Taylor in an interesting relationship to the long tradition of Hudson Valley landscape and still life painting. She acknowledges those histories while gently subverting them. Even the great Dutch floral painters, she notes, were often constructing imaginary bouquets from memory and invention because real flowers decay too quickly to paint directly over time.
For Taylor, the flower is ultimately a vehicle rather than an endpoint. “It’s a format to explore how many kinds of shapes and color combinations I can put together in a way that will push composition into someplace that I haven’t been yet,” she says.
That spirit of experimentation continues to drive her practice. Though she is currently working on more complex still life compositions involving multiple flowers in vases, she continues returning to these singular radiating blooms: paintings that hover between nature and abstraction, beauty and intensity, order and overwhelm.
This article appears in June 2026.
