The Process of Creating with Negative and Positive Emotions: an Interview with Taylor Olson By Cameron Bennett

Taylor Olson, a Graphic Design major in the College of Fine Arts, recently completed her “I Love, I Hate” assignment where students create two posters, one expressing love and the other hate.  On this assignment, she chose to challenge herself and opted for a deeper subject: memory.  

I spoke to Olson about her artistic process as a whole, and she opened up about her abnormal and intuitive approach to creating. “I’m really jealous of people who have a better artistic process than me…Every time I make something I have no idea. It feels like I’m on autopilot, and I’m just [working on something] and then I’ll come up with an idea and find a way to fit it in there,” she says.

There is a contrast in how she made each poster.  For the I Love poster the inspiration flowed a bit easier.  “For the I Love poster I tried to call upon fun memories because I feel like with all my close friends most of what we do is reminisce on funny stories,” she explains. She goes on to say that this made the poster all that much easier, but also made it more difficult because she had many memories to choose from.  On the poster you can see silhouettes of her and her friends at the beach, jewelry she wears a lot with good memories associated, along with 100 words of text detailing a memory at the beach.  

On the other hand, the I Hate poster posed more of a challenge. “I think the I Hate poster is a little more interesting to me, at least, because obviously everyone has bad memories…so I tried to focus on the memories that are the most sad, or the ones that I hate the most are good memories. They might be tainted or spoiled with hindsight.  For example, a good memory from childhood but it’s far enough away that you can never get it back, so that makes it sad,” she noted. 

She also touched on the universal aspects of her posters, saying that she wanted to make them personal, but not just to her. In order to achieve this most of the human figures are silhouettes, so that viewers can project whatever they want onto it.

Olson’s hesitation to delve into deeper and more personal subjects in her art ended up creating a universal and emotional poster.  From the deep layering in the I Love poster to the hidden personal effects you can see the process of creating.  

Follow her @taym0studio