About the artist:

Joy Taylor, who began sculpting in 1985, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2000. The petite artist is now frail, has trouble speaking and receives around-the-clock assistance, provided by husband Ray Taylor and a caregiver. But much like her sculptures, the outside belies the life that dwells within.

Once Parkinson’s took hold, she no longer had the strength to work in stone – it was too demanding, she said. But she misses walking through a site in the Anza-Borrego area where she used to carefully select the huge stones – mostly alabaster – that served as her artistic canvas.

More than a dozen of Taylor’s works of art are displayed at the couples’ home – just a fraction of the sculptures she created and sold during 15 productive years working in the demanding medium. Most of her works were created in her studio at their former home in Newport Beach.

Joy Taylor, who was born in Montreal, Canada, began drawing when she was 10 years old. Some of the first images she produced were pictures of “pin-up girls,” she said.

She studied at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and graduated with a degree in fine and commercial art from Sir George Williams University School of Art in Montreal.

After a multifaceted career working in the commercial art field and painting for many years in a variety of mediums, with Ray’s encouragement, she began focusing all of her artistic energy into sculpture, an art form she had dabbled in some years before.

She turned to sculpting full-time because “I wanted more involvement in my artwork,” she said.

Once she found a stone she liked, she wet it down to get an idea of how it would look when it’s polished. When the stone was delivered to her studio, she might take a couple of days to get a “feel” for the piece. Sometimes she had an idea in her head; sometimes she worked from a sketch. “Sometimes the stone just speaks,” and draws her in and shows her the direction, she said. She’d work four or five hours a day – every day – sometimes as long as a couple of months.

In 1986, following an audition before a jurying panel of judges, she was accepted into Laguna Beach’s Festival of Arts, where she exhibited her work. Three years later, she got the 1989 festival off to a fast start, selling a $10,000 sculpture within two hours of the festival’s opening. She was a regular exhibitor at the La Quinta Arts Festival.

Throughout her career, Joy created original, contemporary stones and produced limited edition bronze and acrylic sculptures. Her sculptures appeared in the window of Tiffany & Co. at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, dripping with pieces of Tiffany’s fine jewelry.

In 1999, she opened Joy Taylor Sculpture and Gallery at the Stonemill Design Center in Costa Mesa.

Her works are found in a number of private and corporate collections and one of her works – the 7-foot-tall stainless steel sculpture, “Emergence,” was featured in a scene of the 1993 Warner Bros. movie, “Point of No Return,” starring Bridget Fonda.

Text by Denise Goolsby for Desert Sun.