Marquetry hybrid innovator Alison Elizabeth Taylor paints with wood grain.
Alison Elizabeth Taylor fashions thin slices of wood veneer, paint, photography, and collage into elaborate tableaux in a new medium that she calls “marquetry hybrid.” Her work depicts the denizens, dwellings, and landscapes of her hometown of Las Vegas and her adopted home of Brooklyn. Taylor’s Las Vegas thrums with pool goers, gem shows, showgirls, desert dome homes, hoodoos, canyons, and hypnotized gamblers. In her New York City pieces, a bodega entrance is a portal; a man in animal print sneakers cuts hair under the Williamsburg Bridge.
Taylor combines her painterly approach and fragile materials into work that is nerve-wracking to make but immensely rich. “I feel a sense of relief when the work gets into a solid form and I can cleat it, hang it on a wall, and begin to paint and collage it,” she says. Widely shown, exhibited, and lauded around the world, Taylor is the subject of a new book, Alison Elizabeth Taylor: The Sum of It, from DelMonico Books and the Addison Gallery of American Art. She wrote about her Brooklyn studio and the challenges of her medium in “Painting with Wood” in the Summer 2023 issue of American Craft.
How do you describe your work or practice?
I’ve created a medium that I call marquetry hybrid, a synthesis of painting, collage, photography, and wood veneer inlay. The underlying structure is marquetry: cutout shapes of different species of wood veneer put together to form the drawn image. On top of this layer, I create painted surfaces: scraping into wood with thickly textured paint, pyrography, oil paint, and pigment prints. My subjects are drawn from what I observe; many subjects come from my walks around Brooklyn or my hometown of Las Vegas. I sketch what I notice in the world, combining what I’ve observed to reconstruct reality in new scenes while hoping to get at deeper understanding.
Alison Elizabeth Taylor, The Residency, 2022, marquetry hybrid, 42 x 51 in.
