Phaedra Jean Taylor

I grew up in North East Scotland and spent many hours walking the surrounding hills with my family. Mountains in Scotland, I found, are quite different than other kinds of mountain. They are packed with rich colors and textures, and change constantly, moment to moment, as the weather shifts. I have a deeply powerful memory of standing in another place in Scotland, a rocky beach, and looking up at the night sky filled with the Aurora Borealis as it danced and undulated overhead. These memories are places where I felt caught up into what I know now as the life of God.

These paintings are an attempt to keep alive and celebrate these memorable moments from my childhood. I carry a grief that I can no longer live in the place I call home, and that ache teaches me to yearn for a new world to come that we can only now see peaking over the eschatological horizon. The British nature writer, Robert Mcfarlane, says this about the places that stay with us in deep ways:

“We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places—retreated to most often when we are most remote from them—are among the most important landscapes we possess.”

I like to think of the experience of missing these beloved places as a way to train my heart toward what C. S. Lewis calls our true country: the place where everything is made right and where we realize what we thought was beauty, or joy, or wonder, was only the tiniest taste of what is really real in the new creation. If Mcfarlane is right, that the landscapes we miss strongly are the most important, then the longing for our true country, I feel, helps us to remember it as a real place, out of touch and sight for the moment, but very much real.

In making this work I’m attempting fan the fire of my longing, both for my home country and it’s beauty, and for the true country that awaits. When you interact with these my hope is that you catch a little bit of that longing, and that it helps you place yourself not as a citizen of this world only, but as one walking home, through this landscape, into the place you truly belong.

I grew up on the rocky, wild coast of Scotland and spent many hours rambling around on beaches searching for the luscious little worlds to be found in tide pools. I loved to stop and squat down, and look, and look, and look at all that was inside of them. They are packed with rich colors and textures, and change constantly day to day as new things get swept in and out of them with the changing tides. There’s something deeply beautiful about these contained spaces that are covered for half of the time, straddling the boundary between land and sea, between exposed and hidden. I can’t think of another thing quite like tide pools. They captivate me and bring me into wonder.

My spiritual tradition includes a Creator God and part of my way of connecting with this Creator includes contemplating the things they have made through making art about them. I wonder, who is the God who imagines places like these? I can only assume that they delight in the playful, mysterious, uncontrollable, and wild, and that there is an invitation into that experiencing those things together through offering us these gifts of nature. Painting these spaces helps me remember those moments of stillness and wonder.

This series of watercolor paintings were all created onsite. The paint was mixed with water from the ocean, creeks, lakes and ponds nearby, the colors inspired by the colors in front of me, and the botanicals draw are the plants that grow wild in this area.

“At least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it - have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation… it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”

- Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, 1993

“Places are made, therefore, through relationships… As we perform and repertory actions in a place, we are simultaneously drawing on that place’s history and memory for our own understanding of ourselves, as well as adding back to the value of the place, remaking it over and over again in a sort of dynamic conversation and liturgy.”

- Jennifer Craft, Placemaking and the Arts, 2018

Pray Daily for Families is available through Pray Daily Press here: Shop

The Light Has Come Illustrations were created out of a desire to provide new resources to facilitate a richly meaningful experience of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. These images hope to make the truths of Christ's coming tangible and transformative in your life as you journey through the season.

Each watercolor illustration was made to accompany a bible verse, a short prayer, and a unique activity created by David Taylor on a 5x7 card to make a set of 25 cards published as a set.

The prayer cards are published by The Rabbit Room and can be purchased through their online store: The Rabbit Room Store

This collection of images includes familiar themes, such as Faith and Hope, Joy and Peace, Shepherds and Angels, but also less familiar ones, like Feasting and Sorrow, Fear and Doubt, the Fantastical and the Mundane.

Prints of all 25 images are available in the shop.

Coming Soon…

When the pandemic hit my children were in pre-school and third grade. It was already a struggle to maintain a creative practice when they were away for some of the day, but when our pre-school shut down and our daughter’s schooling turned virtual, my time for making art became almost non-existent.

We were luckier than most. David, my husband, was already working virtually from home, and my creative work was flexible and could be easily put on hold. I thought I’d just set it aside for a time as we all tried to adjust to what felt like a new normal every week. I found, however, that emotionally and mentally I struggled without the time that I had previously spent, usually deep in contemplative mode in my studio.

Prayer is inextricably linked to my art practice and in a world that felt so unpredictable and unmanageable, I needed that time more than ever.

As an experiment I began making tiny landscapes that I could quickly drop in and out of. One moment I could tear down watercolor into small rectangles; in another I could tape down a few pieces. That might be all that I could manage for a day, but the next day I might be able to grab five minutes to place some quick brush strokes on my paper. A second layer of color would follow—and then a few moments of drawing in a few finishing touches and I could start another one.

In time, these paintings also became my prayers. I worked quickly in-between washing hands, laundering masks, cooking, checking state infection rates, tidying, monitoring spelling tests and soothing anxious hearts.

I could walk away from the studio and return to whatever was being required of me, knowing that my prayers were as real and solid as my paintings—a place I could drop into at any moment that would nourish me once again.

What started as a desperate way to give my brain a measure of sanity, turned into a steady and daily practice that I kept up even after things began to settle in our often-turbulent world. As of this writing I have painted almost 300 tiny prayer landscapes. The ones included in this book were made in much the same way as those first attempts, except that my dedicated studio hours have returned. Instead of ten minutes, I’m able to soak deeply into a more expansive prayer space and to let these images emerge.

In 2024 these paintings, accompanied by almost 400 short prayers written by my husband, David (a priest and professor of theology,) were published by IVP as a prayer book. You can purchase the book through any major book seller, and prints of these images can be found in the shop section of this website.