c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Tres Taylor spent a long time searching for his purpose.

Along the way there were travels to Australia and the Amazon, but, finally, after riding his bike around San Diego one day, he found it.

He’d recently visited a few Southern folk artists while back home in Alabama for Christmas, and had talked with Georgia folk artist R.A. Miller. During the course of their conversation, Taylor said he wished he could do what Miller did.

“You can,” Taylor said Miller told him. “You’re an artist.”

“I think he just believed that everybody was,” Taylor said.

Still, something about Miller’s words stuck.

Within a few weeks, Taylor noticed a bunch of discarded wood by a museum. He tied the lumber to his bicycle and took it back to his apartment, where he used it as a canvas for his painting of a couple coming apart, a heart between them.

Something happened in that painting, he said.

He started, he said, “literally running home after work and just staying in my apartment and just painting.”

“It was so joyful,” he said, adding that he had no intention then of selling his work. It was just for himself.

But soon enough, people learned of Taylor’s work and wanted to buy it. Less than two years after he began painting, he quit his job as a biochemist to pursue his art full time.

“I was given this blessing, this gift, and it shouldn’t just stop with me,” he said.

The Birmingham, Ala.-based artist said he hopes his work conveys what he seeks, “that love and peace that I suppose we’re all capable of having, but we get in the way of it all the time. … When you truly understand what the deepest aspects of love are, then you will have the peace and the joy that come with that no matter where you’re at.”

Before he began painting, Taylor said, it was as if he had cataracts.

“I couldn’t see the joy so much anymore,” said Taylor, who described himself as a Christian Buddhist. “I felt really disconnected. And the painting brought me back.”

When he paints, he noted in an artistic statement several years ago, it’s “as if I were a conduit for some power, some Angelic presence who uses my hands for the purpose of showing to the world the beauty of God.

“I just really feel like it’s been a gift, and it came very late in life, but it came,” said Taylor, 49.

That’s not to say that each moment since he began painting about eight years ago has been transcendent. Sometimes, there’s a struggle for inspiration. Other times, he said he’s challenged to bring the love, peace and joy about which he paints into his daily life.

In 2002, about two years after he gave up his work as a researcher, Taylor said he was stuck. He couldn’t paint, and wondered if he was the subject of some kind of cosmic joke.

A fellow artist suggested that Taylor take a walk in the woods. “Maybe,” his colleague suggested, “God will give you something for your art.”

The next day, Taylor said he walked up a small mountain behind his studio in Goshogawara, Japan, and prayed for a sign. The breeze picked up, and excited, he said, he began running. Then he slowed, and as he noticed a feather on the trail, he sighted a hawk through a hole in the tree canopy.

For Taylor, something about the moment _ he’s still not sure what _ was so powerful it brought him to his knees and then moved him to dance, accompanied all the while by the hawk.

When he returned to his studio, Taylor said he was so inspired, paint seemed to pour from his fingertips. For the next month or so, the hawk continued to visit him, coming when he whistled.

But once he hung the work for his show, which he called “Love Letters from God,” he never saw the bird again.

The hawk isn’t the only animal that’s helped Taylor.

One day last summer, he recalled recently, he was trying to paint and was “kind of being a bit of a bear to be around.” After his family left him to paint at a family retreat in Mentone, Ala., Taylor said he noticed his dog, Mabel, had picked up “Music of Silence,” a tome that, according to Taylor, encourages people to live and act with reverence.

“It was easy to intellectualize my spirituality, but she was teaching me to put it into practice,” he explained in an e-mail.

“Painting is what I love to do, and so life is easy there,” he added. “But the better way is to bring that same reverence and love into everything I do.”

(Kristen Campbell writes for The Press-Register in Mobile, Ala.)

KRE/CM END CAMPBELL750 words

Photos of Taylor’s artwork are available via https://religionnews.com.