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Eric Taggart
I walked into a room that I figured used to be a pool house. But what I saw inside that room was nothing that I had ever seen in any pool house before. There were baby dolls on the ground, some missing their bodies. There were scribblings on the walls, mounds of old canvases, and old, broken guitars. now, if you didn’t know that Eric Taggart was an artist, you
probably would find this room frightening, but the truth is that it’s the opposite. This room is a studio. A lab where Eric reveals his inner emotions, thoughts, and feelings to himself, by channeling raw feeling into his artwork. For Eric, this place is a jungle gym - a playroom of sorts, where he lets his mind run wild. This is the very room in which Eric makes his escapes.
Eric’s definition of what escaping through art does for him is quite simple, but still so incredibly important to his life. “I think art is a way that I process a lot of my feelings and emotions. I work with what you might call troubled youth - kids with disabilities, mental health concerns - things like that, so it can be pretty intense work and I definitely see when I look at my artwork after it’s done, I see that I’ve processed a lot of my emotions and my thoughts and feelings about those kids and their lives in my artwork, and so I think it’s a way to kind of let out all that stress and tension and work through it.” A prime example of escape. Eric uses his artwork to channel that raw emotion that he has into something great. And not only does it relieve those feelings that he has inside of him, but it actually allows him to use those feelings to do something productive. For Eric, art gives him a much needed relief.
The differences between artists and how they view and experience their escapes is an amazing aspect of the subject, and Eric’s views are no exception. “In a sense I feel like flow, for me, is like a form of prayer, and it’s a way of being really in touch with what’s going on inside of me and kind of really in touch with my surroundings and the materials that I’m working with.” Eric can capture his environment through the zone he reaches in his escapes, what he refers to as his “flow”. This statement goes along with those of other artists, a common theme between them being that they have a definable zone where they feel most productive and leave reality completely on some occasions. Eric also feels like his artwork “takes on a life of it’s own” at times, another common factor between artists and musicians escaping into the zone. This sense of how art ceases to be consciously created
definitely seems to go along with losing track of time, something Eric relates to greatly. “You definitely lose your sense of time. I’ll be down in the studio for six hours and think that it was like thirty minutes, I will really like lose my concept of time.”
Eric’s place of escape is achievable most easily for him through art. In this place of escape, he experiences a serious loss of time and feels in touch with himself and the materials and area around him. He uses this escape as a way to vent emotions and thoughts that otherwise, would be left inside of him. But even though his escape may take place differently than other artists, and he may get to that place in a different way, all of those artists are still getting there in the end