For many years, Pam Taggart was considered an abstract artist. Now she acknowledges the importance of the images emerging in her recent paintings and drawings: birds, trees, fish, hands. More than that, she admits to having been a closet imagist all along—the images were there, but covered, disguised or buried. The newly appearing forms add an open-ended resonance to her large, forceful, and yes, largely abstract compositions.

A period of searching was catalyzed by personal tragedy, the loss of her brother. This eventually led Taggart to turn from painting, her primary medium, back to drawing in the early 1990’s. At first these dark works held what she called “primal images”—rounded, indistinct forms. But over several years, more recognizable images emerged in the thickly worked charcoal, all of them stark, strongly drawn and unapologetically frontal: a series of skeletal birds, their wings pressing right to the edge of the paper; naked figures; many self-portraits, staring out in huge closeup. Continue reading Miriam Seidel on the Large Works in Oil