A Vibrant Artist Making Vibrant Art
Josie Taglienti
by
Dan Koon, for Fine Art Registry®
"I have used oil, ink, acrylic, watercolor, all the usual media," she says. "Then I met pastel."
I do not remember when exactly I discovered pastel as a serious method of dispensing color to paper. I love the color, their texture and how they absolutely refuse to be controlled. I like things that cannot be controlled. You know, animals, children ... I really like to know someone or something that is absolutely alive. Pastels are absolutely alive!"
And from this struggle to control that which refuses to be controlled come the swirling, intensely colored works of Phoenix artist Josie Taglienti. Looking at her large hanging scrolls, one sees influences of the Spanish and Mexican artists she so greatly admires, Picasso, the Surrealist Remedios Varo and her favorite, Jose Luis Cuevas. One can also see the ornate marks of her ancestor, the 16th Century
Italian calligrapher, GiovanniAntonio Tagliente.
Josie's father taught her penmanship with the flourish and curlicues embedded in the family DNA at the kitchen table of their home in Minnesota's north country. Brought up in an ethnic group of Greeks, Jews, Finns, Italians and Slovenians among the Swedes and Norwegians, not to mention Bob Dylan, her childhood world was awash in music, different cultures and intense politics. Josie's parents dreamed of a musical life for their daughter. Piano lessons, choral and playing marimba in the school orchestra never did develop. But the making of images did and this became her consuming passion.
She loved the swift strokes of bright color that sprang from her first watercolor set. She was fascinated by people's faces. An early infatuation with fashion design led to her first sale, a small drawing of a provocatively posed swimsuit model for which she received a nickel from two boys in class, and a rebuke from her Puritanical teacher.
During Josie's years at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design she met the Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, then lecturing at the college. "Color! Add color," he insisted, and this lesson has proved indelible.
The school favored abstract expressionism at the time, and Josie struggled to creatively apprehend the thought process of abstraction while absorbing lessons of Zen, hoping all the while to discover the ultimate method of painting. Unfortunately, that didn't progress beyond the school cafeteria where, butter knife to dinner plate, Josie determinedly pushed mustard and ketchup around in endless doodles. "Now," she says, "I've graduated from the need to understand, and my only visible idiosyncrasy is to either blur my vision or work without specs. When viewing the progress of a work with glasses on, I become surprised. An internal force explodes and brings elation. This joy fills the process and becomes the process itself."
Josie's art education led her next to Mankato State, then to Kansas City Art Institute. In Delaware she learned batik, the Javanese art of wax and dye. Up and down the East Coast she exhibited wall hangings, designed garments and executed portrait commissions. Then, as a single mom, Josie studied in Mexico in the Instituto San Miguel de Allende at the University of Guanajuato. She and friends would go to the bullfights and sketch furiously, then head back to the studio to paint while the colors, sights and smells were still fresh. These years of education were well served when Josie moved to Chicago where she worked in commercial avenues--carpet design, textiles, illustration and book covers.
Through it all, her love for pastels has evolved and deepened. "They scatter their dust everywhere--and I use paper that is not conducive to pastel. It struggles with me and I with it. Somewhere we both give in a little. I used pastel for quick sketch portraits for sale in bars and music clubs in Mexico, Chicago, Florida, wherever I traveled. Pastel allowed me to pack up and pack down quickly."
"With pastel," she continues, "anyplace is a place to work. Apartment living rooms become a studio. Once I lived in a tiny hotel room for several months. I just spread the pastels on a canvas on the single bed, tacked a large paper on the wall, stood on the bed to work and just left it all there. At night, I crawled in one end of the bed and went to sleep. It worked. Pastel always works."
Life at the edge of creation
"I begin a work sometimes with a model, sometimes just with something I've felt. Mostly, though, it is about silent words that live in your heart. I begin by communicating with the paper. I scribble on it, strokes of color allowing a birth. At this point I don't have a clue about its direction. Then at some point, the paper begins to speak, sometime in the process the piece needs space, it begins to have a life of its own. So I let it hang for however long it needs. It tells me what to do next. I have to be listening with my eyes."
Josie prefers Japanese papers or Egyptian papyrus over canvas. She likes the strength of paper, its texture, receptivity and ability to hold swift attacks of color. She finds paper an "awesome companion," often resistant and always a challenge, and thus ideally suited to her process and her art.
The fruits of Josie's efforts have found international acceptance; they hang in private and corporate collections from American Airlines to Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. From one woman gallery shows in Mexico, Chicago, Scottsdale and Phoenix to numerous group shows from across America from Delaware to Hawaii, to her pioneering contributions to the collective Art Meets Labor which brought coal miners throughout the east to Chicago to display their paintings and read their poems, Josie's work continues to attract a wide-ranging audience of admirers. Not the least to appreciate her work and benefit from a life immersed in creation are her life drawing students and the muralists at Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix where she teaches.
Preserving for the future
For some time Josie had been considering how to record provenance of her body of work. She'd seen a few places that offered something but nothing that excited her like the First Friday event in Phoenix where she met Teri Franks, founder and CEO of Fine Art Registry™.
"THIS IS IT for artists," Josie says of FAR®. "I have a lot of in-progress work, so as I finish each piece, I will tag it and zip it on the site. It is a rewarding activity and Teri and her assistant Lynn are awesome human beings. It would take a book to relate how supportive they are."
The FAR proprietary method of identifying each piece guarantees provenance forever, something Josie could have used earlier in her career. "I have lost track of sales and lost a few pieces over the years," she says. "Once, sending pieces to a New York show from Mexico, the work was not picked up at customs by the handler. Months later, I received notification that the work was still there...and about to be auctioned off! I couldn't get word fast enough for anyone to intervene and the work was lost. If it had been tagged, I would have had documentation and could have taken action."
"I hold tags for work sold prior to when I started tagging and registering my pieces. I place a note to the owner on the piece description on the FAR website so they can go to the site and contact me for their registration and authenticity certificate. Former clients have been sending me photos of pieces of mine they own. I then send them the tags, place the work in my portfolio on the FAR site and the collector will transfer ownership and register the work in their name. It's amazing!!"
An amazing means of preserving Josie's creations for future generations while we continue to enjoy them today. From an upcoming exhibition, a collaboration with poet Gene Rister and composer Christopher Scinto to support the scholarship fund at her college to her inclusion in the prestigious 6th International Florence Biennial of Contemporary Art next year (where Josie will be sponsored in part by Fine Art Registry), art enthusiasts can continue to appreciate Josie Taglienti's singularly vibrant art.
— by Dan Koon
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November 1, 2006
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