ART
Growing up here influenced her works
BY WILLI MILLER
Loughlin’s oil on canvas Pool Step is a study in the interaction between water and skin.
For Taylor Loughlin, there’s no place like home. When
the artist returned to the area after earning her Bachelor
of Fine Arts degree from Flagler College, Port St.
Lucie is where she settled. She brought with her the
school’s Art and Design Award for Painting.
Growing up in a family of creative people made the life of
an artist the natural path for Loughlin to walk. Her father,
David, has created pencil art for as long as she can remember.
His mother, Paula, was an artist, working for a greeting
card company. “She lived in New Jersey and used to send
me handmade greeting cards in the mail.” On her mother’s
side, the women were great seamstresses and cooks and her
brother, Jason, is a musician in Brooklyn.
Loughlin was born in Palm Beach Gardens, but moved
to Port St. Lucie with her parents as an infant. She attended
Manatee Elementary and St. Lucie West Middle School, and
then went to Fort Pierce’s Lincoln Park Academy, where she
completed the International Baccalaureate program.
EARLY ART INTEREST
Loughlin didn’t decide that art was her calling until she
reached high school, but as a youngster “I would make small
doodles on anything I could get my hands on,” the artist
says. “I also loved making small, hand-drawn books as a
child,” a lead-in to her high school studies at Lincoln Park,
where one of the yearlong projects was the making of an art
book. The premise was to choose a famous artist to study
through the year. “You would paint a portion of the artist’s
pieces on each page and then write your thoughts and
summary about that piece over top of it.” Loughlin says she
shares some of the struggles that her chosen artist, Edvard
Munch, wove through his work.
Saturdays became an extension of her studies, with painting
classes under Vero Beach artist Ellen Fischer in her Fort
Pierce studio. “I started with still-life drawings and worked
my way into acrylic painting. At the time, I used ads out of
magazines I thought were interesting as reference material,”
one more guidepost along the path to her current passion for
exploring the interaction between water and skin.
“LOVE AFFAIR” WITH OIL
This self-described “true Floridian” lives in Port St. Lucie, >>
Port St. Lucie Magazine 39