Lisa Kurzner Steve Pomberg

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During our visit, I see that Katherine Taylor is all about direct address and taking action as she strides, while talking, across her entryway into the expansive space of her Grant Park studio. This runs counterintuitive to how I think of her painting—placid skeins of oil paint gradually bringing distant landscapes into sharply focused view. Taylor is as eloquent as her work. A fine arts faculty member at Kennesaw State University, she freely discusses her materials and working methods, how they draw on art historical precedents as well as autobiography.

A native of the Biloxi coast, Taylor has made the landscape of her home territory, both real and imagined, the subject of her work for the past several years. Her series of 2004-2006, Afterimage and Aftermath, depicted the destruction and devastation caused by water and weather, beginning with her childhood memories of Hurricane Camille that struck that coastline in 1969. Based upon fragments from newspaper clippings and the artist's own photography, these paintings, rendered only in grayscale, are epic in size and as majestic as history paintings. Though operatic in theme, these bleak still lifes of abandoned cars and flooded neighborhoods seem mysterious and emotionally private, much as Eric Fischl's starkly painted domestic dramas of the 1980s.

Bathtub, oil on canvas, 36 by 48 inches.

Taylor has developed variegated painting techniques of thin, fluid layers in a style brought to prominence by Gerhard Richter a generation ago, but she builds pictures which resonate with personal and emotional behaviors that are not part of Richter's work. Though the subjects may appear vague—coastal formations peppered with seemingly random bits of debris—they are intimately bound with her past.

Biloxi's water economy first relied on the natural landscape; the shrimp boats, farmers and leisure class of yachtsmen. The casinos created an entirely new cultural fabric of tourist entertainment in the 1980s. Though Taylor traveled extensively between earning her BA at the Atlanta College of Art in 1990, and her MFA from Georgia State in 2002, home turf continues to provide inspiration, beginning with her MFA thesis show of beauty pageant queens painted through the distorted flash and glamour to the most recent landscapes that reject artifice and drama altogether.

Taylor has just been nominated for the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany grant, a nationally selected fine arts award. She is represented by Marcia Wood Gallery, marciawoodgallery.com. Last year, Taylor was featured in the main gallery of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, at Brenau University Gallery, Gainesville, GA., and at Diverse Works, a noteworthy nonprofit gallery in Houston.