Sunny Taylor is a talented painter with a project called The Lines Series. She received a BFA from BYU and an MFA from The Ohio State University. She taught as an assistant professor from 2008-14 in the Studio Arts program of BYU and now lives and paints with her family in Utah. Taylor was profiled previously on The Krakens for The Objecthood of Painting and 3D Sculptures.

Do you find yourself looking for patterns in your day-to-day life? I see patterns everywhere I go, yet as I think about it, I very rarely find inspiration in patterns and forms within my own home and day-to-day living.  I am generally most drawn to the patterns and forms that are in the ‘periphery’ of my life.  I’m constantly averting my eyes to the sides of the road while I am driving, or the corners of the store where structures meet and converse. When I look through the files of scrap photos I’ve gathered over the years, most things that inspire my work are found in architecture, dumpsters, parking lots, backyards, demolition and construction sites.

Tell us about your workplace and habits. I have two girls, 4 and 2 years old.  Their schedule determines my schedule.  I am lucky to have good nappers, so at 1:00 in the afternoon, I can often get in a good hour or two of painting.  On Wednesdays, my mother in law watches my girls, and I work as hard and as fast as I can in my studio.  I also work a couple evenings a week.  When I have a deadline for a painting, I stay up late a lot, and I don’t get enough sleep. : )

My studio is a spare bedroom in our home.  Having a studio at home is SO helpful.  If I have even just 20 minutes available, I can run into the studio and make a dent in a project.  I love it.  I most often listen to podcasts, audiobooks, interviews and radio programs when I paint.  Every now and then I will listen to music.  Usually I turn on the music when I am measuring and can’t concentrate on stories and other information at the same time, or when I am grappling with a color or compositional problem and need to focus on resolving the visual problems at hand.

Visit Sunny Taylor’s website.

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Michal Luch Onyon is an accomplished designer, illustrator, and painter. She received a BFA from the University of Utah and began oil painting several years ago after a career in illustration and graphic design. She adds, “I think all these past experiences help me as I discover that painting encompasses more than a lifetime of challenges and ideas. It is a timeless feeling to escape everyday life by trying capture and reinvent from a world so much bigger and varied than we can imagine.” Onyon was previously profiled on The Krakens for A Family Tree of Talent.

What inspires your creativity these days? When I paint I am striving to create an alternate reality. I attempt to manipulate the world in varying degrees. How much am I using realism and how much fiction alters it? In every painting I am making problems and then solving them. I love rocks, trees, birds, people, patterns, animals, colorful geometric objects…and everything else. I struggle to make emotional, edgy work and keep coming up with lively, happy stuff (should I quit using orange?) If I could get over my need to be pleasant and in control and make life symmetrical, I would be a different artist. I try for harmonious yet exciting changes of color. Different artists amaze me. At any given time I have a stack of open resource books: Field guides to birds, Maynard Dixon, Gustave Klimt, Diebenkorn, Illuminated Renaissance Manuscripts, Hieronymous Bosch, Modern Primitives, photographs of landscapes, Anatomy.

Visit Michal Onyon’s website.