what’s on?
preston taylor
portrait of the artist as a painter [wip title]
jan 2026
in this exhibition/expo i am presenting wip artefacts from an ongoing project i have been developing over the past few months. still in progress, still working out the kinks, trying to figure out what questions i want to ask with this work and how i want to go about discovering answers, or where to start locating these answers, this work is not yet mature enough or fleshed out enough to exist, say, on my website or to be shown publicly otherwise. so that’s why we’re here.
a lonely painter, so obsessed with the medium everything else fades into periphery — human desire, fame, recognition, subject matter, methods of meaning-making... the fetishization of medium, in this case oil paint, eclipses anything that gets in the way. misunderstood, the painter finds himself seduced into a sexual obsession with the object of his desire; fighting for, defending, protecting, jealous of, pining for as if a lover. this private fetishized obsession challenges all that he claims to know about art and his role as a contemporary artist in the post-medium and post-post-studio condition. etrenched in theoretical discourse as both a producer and peer amongst academicians and para-academic artists, and thus steadfast in his determination that to just paint is not enough, how does he reckon with this taboo love affair?
- preston
a lonely painter, so obsessed with the medium everything else fades into periphery — human desire, fame, recognition, subject matter, methods of meaning-making... the fetishization of medium, in this case oil paint, eclipses anything that gets in the way. misunderstood, the painter finds himself seduced into a sexual obsession with the object of his desire; fighting for, defending, protecting, jealous of, pining for as if a lover. this private fetishized obsession challenges all that he claims to know about art and his role as a contemporary artist in the post-medium and post-post-studio condition. etrenched in theoretical discourse as both a producer and peer amongst academicians and para-academic artists, and thus steadfast in his determination that to just paint is not enough, how does he reckon with this taboo love affair?
- preston
it’s a fun project because it innately exists so multimodally, rather, it is so process based. the flow feels fertile, i only began questioning the physicality of an object in his life after approaching it in a painting,,, when he looks out the window at the rain, what does he feel? what does he see? what do the pages in his sketchbook look like...
painting en plein air, sunset seeping too quickly, dusk fades into pitch black night and something catches my eye. a soft, burning ember light filters through a flitting assemblage of branch, leave, tree. following the source i find myself staring through the window, the most beautiful sight i have ever seen. not the woman, no, of course not. but the scene. she stands, self-assured and confident, more confident than i could ever imagine being, in front of the most sexy, beautiful thing i have ever seen. soft, supple pink flesh so inexplicably taut, glowing, just begging me to fantasize how it would feel to run my finger across the grain of her pores, the way she would tremble and shake under my soft graze. i can’t keep my eyes away. fumbling for my binoculars, i sense my racing heartbeat awakening the birds in slumber above my head. when the lens reaches my eye, my arousal immediately replaced by horror. the woman, unashamedly defiling utter perfection, traces a circle in the most offputting, offensive, disgusting shade of sickly sweet blue-green that comes from giving viridian a taste of titanium. dejected, i pack up my tubes, brushes, oil soaked rags precariously balanced upon my easel, haphazardly tossing everything into my canvas rucksack before lifting the easel up and folding it’s feeble legs into itself as i blaze through the brush. later, i scrawl into my journal ‘never again let yourself be lured by into sexual fantasy like prey to a lioness. artists are dissapointing.’