Press • Flower Painter

After several cups of coffee and then a glass of wine at sundown in Tiffani Taylor's Savannah studio, I'm convinced that there are more poppy fields than people in Utah.  "They are my youth," Tiffani reminisces with a smile.  "Driving alongside them during the day and surrounded by them in my dreams...me, amidst a sea of poppies, my skin blushed with red, and starring at music notes fluttering above."  Odd to someone who doesn't know Tiffani, perhaps, but this simple, imaginary scene has inspired hundreds of evocative floral paintings and legions of Tiffani fans.

In 1998, Tiffani left her poppied Utah for the warmer and more artistic climate of Savannah, GA.  An eager painting student at the Savannah college of Art and Design with a meager budget of $2 a day, she was determined not to be a starving artist.  "I was such a serious artist-to-be back then," she says mockingly as we flip through her portfolio--earnest portraits rendered with a tight, careful hand.  But as she turns the pages, a new confidence beams.  It seems that as she ventured into color and flowers, she lightened her grip, reached deep inside, and allowed her true art to bloom (pun intended, absolutely.)  And, oh my, how this young artiste has made quite a name for herself since her first days in Savannah, now attracting celebrity and not-so-celebrity clients far and wide.

Tiffani's studio appears more like a still life than an abode for her works in progress.  (Even her "painting jeans" are relatively sans paint dribble.)  Old sheet music, vintage prayer cards from Italian flea markets, stacks of canvasses posed against the wall splattered with...coffee?  I can't help it," Tiffani admits, "I always leave half-drunk cups of coffee lying around."  In other words, a cup-full tumbling down onto one of her blank canvasses was not at all recherche.  But Tiffani took this "happy accident" in stride, mixing the coffee with left over gold leaf to create the perfect primer for layers of flowers.   It's organic, yet opulent, a somewhat primal foundation for her seductive flower scenes.  Across the room, a table stacked neatly with plates, bowls, pitchers, door-knobs, and vases adorned with poppies, irises, and more.  At the room's center, looking out onto a newly planted garden, is Tiffani's easel holding her most recent work on tits ledge.  From a distance, it evokes a European flower market--irises and hydrangeas galore, one bunch priced at 25 euro.  But upon closer inspection, the layers and layers of meaning emerge.  The flowers are painted on decoupaged pages of a novel by George Elliot, and in the place of cross hatching, Tiffani has incorporated tight lines of her own poetry in a rustic gold.  "It was inspired by a scene in Middlemarch,"  she tells me.  Flower scenes radiating from her childhood imagination or culled from her travels have today become a source of wisdom and immense strength for Tiffani...and for her clients as well.

I still can't believe that I get to wake up every morning and paint for a living?!  Can you imagine anything better?"  Well, no.  If only we shared her coveted stroke.  From a little girl in Utah dreaming of poppy fields and Europe...to a painter whose lievely, yet emotionally immense flower scenes have won great acclaim.  What's next for Tiffani?  A two week sejourn in Provence amongst fields of lavender and sunflowers.  "I bought charcoals for this trip, "Tiffani tells me with glowing excitedment.  A much easier medium to carry around whild pedddling Provence a bicyclette, indeed.

An article written by the fabulous and talented Molly Rowe.