“By training and by temperament, I am a representational painter. I enjoy the people, places, and objects that are a part of my everyday life. Using these as subject matter, I try to compose images that have a peaceful feeling, sometimes with a touch of humor or whimsy. Even though the paintings are illusionistic and draw on classical traditions, they usually have abstract design elements underneath.

“The paintings in this show consist of a variety of landscape and still life subjects. Idaho is known for its spectacular mountain scenery like the Sawtooths, but there is another side to the landscape that I enjoy. I find the wide-open spaces, two-lane roads, farm fields, and telephone poles of Canyon County have a more quiet, reflective kind of beauty. I look for compositions in places that most people would overlook — a bridge over a canal, for example.

“Still life painting has been a strong interest of mine since my student days. I typically paint ordinary forms from nature, combined with man-made objects. In these paintings, creating a strong, formal composition is my main focus. I frequently pay homage to some of my art heroes from the past by including images of their work. A recent series explores a dramatic change of scale, rendering things ten or twenty times their normal size. They take on a monumental quality and allow for close examination of the structure and interior textures of the objects.

“Some other paintings in the show combine still-life objects with paintings of the landscape in the background. It’s a challenge to somehow combine these two subjects in a unified composition, with strong spatial contrasts. And there is a little trickery here, as the paintings are not really what they seem to be. They are illusions of illusions.”

John Taye is a retired art professor from Boise State University, where he taught painting, drawing, and sculpture for 33 years.

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