Art touches all bases of mental health journey
MLB artist initially turned to painting as a coping method
The striking art on birchwood panels featuring Mike Trout, Bryce Harper and their home-run hammering brethren that landed Lauren Taylor certified artist status from Major League Baseball evolved from a painful-looking selfie.
It’s a messy mug shot of Taylor, a 32-year-old from Vancouver, after losing a duel with a line drive in May 2017.
In the photo her face is swollen, bruised and so obviously aching. Taylor had been playing third base in a coed slo-pitch game and the guy at the plate turned on a juicy pitch.
Taylor is talented enough on the diamond that she was once sponsored by Louisville. She just didn’t get enough glove on this slugger’s bullet.
She suffered broken bones in her face, a hemorrhaged retina and concussion. That head injury was the worst. She had battled anxiety and panic attacks for years and until that ball in the face she felt the problems were being properly managed. But the medication she had been taking stopped being as effective after that slo-pitch injury.
Taylor had initially turned to art to help deal with her mental health issues. She said art “felt safer than words.” She felt it was time to amp it up again.
She had experimented with using wood as a canvas after a buddy found a scrap piece lying around their apartment building basement. She created a stencil and went from there.
She is a baseball fan of notable zest and zeal. Her first of these creations (digital stencil, acrylic paint and ink) was for Gibsons pitcher Ryan Dempster, in conjunction with the right-hander going into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 2018 as part of the accolades for his lengthy Major League Baseball career.
On the back of the Dempster piece, Taylor wrote a note thanking him for his running feud with New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez during a 2013 series with Dempster’s then-Boston Red Sox. She had played slo-pitch with Chris Dempster — Ryan’s younger brother — who’s a Vancouver firefighter. Brother connected her with brother.
She then did a piece for James Paxton, the left-hander pitcher from Ladner who, at that point, was coming off no-hitting the Toronto Blue Jays for the Seattle Mariners.
Taylor reached out on Instagram and one connection led to another and eventually to Paxton.
Since then she’s done artwork of almost every big leaguer you can imagine. If you plan to scroll down her list at laurentaylorillustrations.com, you’d better invest some time as she’s done more than 300.
There are noteworthy sluggers such as Trout, Harper and Giancarlo Stanton. There are ace pitchers like Clayton Kershaw and Chris Sale.
She was just in New York, taking a painting of CC Sabathia to the veteran Yankees hurler that had been commissioned by Mets second baseman Robinson Cano as a gift to celebrate Sabathia’s final MLB season.
It seems like Taylor has this all figured out, but some days she still struggles with anxiety and panic. The good thing is, she’s open to talking about the challenges. Her pictures, as it were, are worth some important words.
“There are two parts. One part is that I want athletes to think of me when they want a piece of art,” Taylor said.
“The other part is that I want to be an advocate for mental health. I find that the bigger platform I get, the more I’m able to speak about it and influence people.
“I’ll get messages from people saying they’re grateful about me being honest about struggling, about panic or anxiety or depression and those mean more to me than any of the big meetings.
“There’s the two parts. There’s the athlete part and the human part. There are plenty of people who influence through success, but I think it’s also important to influence through common struggle. I think there’s even more mental health stuff out there.”
Taylor maintains “the only C I ever got in college was art class.” In 2014, Telus had her help tell the stories of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside by doing sketches of people who lived there. There’s a 10-minute documentary called Eastside Stories that covers the complex community issue.
Taylor is originally from Friday Harbor, Wash. She played fastpitch at Wenatchee Valley College and then moved to the Lower Mainland for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, landing a job with Aramark Foods, where she worked out of Hockey House.
She’s remained in Vancouver since, and was working at an investment company until October, when she decided to try to make a living full time via art.
She’ll work on pieces for multiple players from one team and then travel to where they are playing to deliver them and get snapshots with them.
MLB requires her to use Getty Images for the photos on which she bases her art. She also has to track down the players herself, admitting she leans heavily on social media, word of mouth and athlete networking.
She had done a Cano piece and presented it to him. He called a week before the Mets and Yankees were scheduled to start their series about doing something for Sabathia, his former Yankee teammate. She spent 16 to 20 hours on the stencil for the project, and then worked another 40 hours on the wood.
“There are some days I think I am never going to make it and some days I am standing next to CC Sabathia,” she said. “I’m a mess some days. And I think people forget to talk about that part of it.
“And then people like myself, who are Anxious Annies anyway, are like, ‘I’m a failure, because soand-so never talked about this.’”