Wooden Indian c. 1940

Robert W.R. Taylor made this "Wooden Indian" with watercolor, graphite, and colored pencil. What I see in Taylor’s work is a dedication to the craft of looking. It’s a flat image, but there's an attempt at three-dimensionality. I mean, look at the geometric base, the layering of colour and tone! The rendering is naive, and that feels special to me. See the shading of the figure's skin and the clothing, where Taylor seems to work at the shapes as though he were modelling them, one mark at a time. Think of Guston's hooded figures or Redon’s strange hot air balloons. This could be from the same universe. There's a real conversation here, about commerce and representation. You feel a push and pull between abstraction and figuration. It’s like Taylor is reminding us that art is as much about the idea of something as it is the thing itself. It doesn’t get more philosophical than that.