Kevin Earl Taylor’s paintings have a reputation for being ominous, thanks to the otherworldliness of moody scenes featuring animals and androgynous humans.

Kevin Earl Taylor was one of those skate-or-die kids in high school. Those were the days when he was sponsored by Thunder Trucks, skipped prom to skate, and listened to punk. Skateboarding was important for another reason, too. The San Francisco-based painter says it helped him to develop an artist’s mindset. “When you’re skateboarding, you’re kind of walking down the sidewalk, and everything you look at has the potential to be something else,” he said. “If you’re behind a shopping center, and there’s nothing to skateboard on, all the sudden you start looking at the trashcans, and the dumpsters, and this crappy piece of wood that’s lying on the ground. And you start to almost make this kind of recreational sculpture.”

An Assembly Eternal. 

Taylor still skates. But, today, his motto would more likely be paint or die. And he aims to maintain a sense of this scrappy playfulness in his artwork. Just take the pun-infected comics, or “punny fages,” he draws when he’s not painting—in one, a metal kid throws devil horns at his roof. Title: “Ceiling Fan.”

The lighter side of Taylor’s work often gets overlooked. His paintings have a reputation for being ominous, thanks to the otherworldliness of moody scenes featuring animals and androgynous humans. Taylor prefers to think art can be serious and have a sense of humor, too. Again, he’s influenced by his skating days, when bands like The Circle Jerks sang about overdosing and junk mail. “They have a good balance of this is a really serious moment, but let’s not take ourselves too seriously because the world’s going to end one day.”

Aqua Miami. 

Taylor does take up meaningful themes in his paintings, often focusing on the animal world, as though he’s striving to remind humans that we’re animals, too, (if Taylor were an animal, he’d be a raccoon, which he likes to think of as bandits). Animals not only make great subjects for paintings; Taylor believes we could learn a thing or two from our furry, fanged friends. “If we could think a little bit more with that [animal] part of our brain that we’ve kind of lost touch with, I think that we would make some smarter decisions about our future, and the way we treat our habitat and other people on the planet,” he said. -- Sarah Tomlinson/Hurley Art

For more on Kevin Earl Taylor, go to www.kevinearltaylor.com.