California Coast
Durango has few holiday traditions like Lorraine Taylor’s window painting
Lorraine Taylor, 86, paints a window at Durango City Hall using her signature script writing. Taylor will produce some of her last holiday art this fall during her 59th season. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
Lorraine Taylor, 86, paints a window at Durango City Hall using her signature script writing. Taylor will produce some of her last holiday art this fall during her 59th season. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
Lorraine Taylor’s holiday designs have brightened business windows and signaled the holiday season in Durango for 59 years.
But this year’s art may be among her last.
“I’ve been telling people I’m going to paint one next year just so I can say that I painted 60 years,” she said.
For the last nearly six decades, Taylor, 86, has painted dozens of windows every November and December, one year decorating 110.
So far this year, Taylor has painted seven windows with at least Maria’s Bookshop and Ohana Physical Therapy to go. Her work has taken her all over La Plata County, from Durango to Bayfield to Ignacio.
“I enjoy it,” she said. “. People like to visit with you and I like to visit.”
It all started by accident when Taylor and a friend were asked to paint a window for an art show.
As they were making a sign for the event, another business owner noticed and asked if they painted windows.
Lorraine Taylor, left, speaks with her painting partner, Diana Crawford, as they plan out their work. Taylor has encouraged Crawford to take over for her when she finally decides to call it quits. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
Lorraine Taylor, left, speaks with her painting partner, Diana Crawford, as they plan out their work. Taylor has encouraged Crawford to take over for her when she finally decides to call it quits. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
Lorraine Taylor with her financial ledger dating back several decades. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
Lorraine Taylor with her financial ledger dating back several decades. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
“My friend and I looked at one another and said, ‘Yeah!’” Taylor said.
Asked if they would paint his window, “We picked up our buckets of paint and away we went,” she said.
Taylor first started keeping track of her clients on a ledger a year later in 1963.
The book has become a record of Durango as it has changed over the decades.
“It’s fun to read my ledger especially with somebody that’s been around,” Taylor said.
“(Many of the businesses) are pretty much gone, the ones I painted originally,” she said.
Former downtown landmark Hogan’s was one of Taylor’s first customers, although customer was a stretch.
Lorraine Taylor mixes paint from the back of her car. So far this year, Taylor has done seven paintings with plans to do at least two more. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
Lorraine Taylor mixes paint from the back of her car. So far this year, Taylor has done seven paintings with plans to do at least two more. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
“A lot of times I’d do Hogan’s when (Jerry Poer) wasn’t looking,” she said. “Jerry would be going down the street with his coffee cup and I’d run across the street and put a holly berry and holly on his door down low. He didn’t want them painted, but I’d go do it.”
Taylor’s window painting started as a way to make money for Christmas presents and school clothes, but it has since become a social event.
“Now it’s (about) the camaraderie of people talking to me that’ve known me for a long time,” she said. “You want to stand there and visit. It’s always fun.”
Lorraine Taylor, left, and her partner, Diana Crawford, paint Christmas trees on the windows of Durango City Hall. Taylor began painting windows by accident after a local business owner saw her painting a sign for an art show and asked her to do his window. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
Lorraine Taylor, left, and her partner, Diana Crawford, paint Christmas trees on the windows of Durango City Hall. Taylor began painting windows by accident after a local business owner saw her painting a sign for an art show and asked her to do his window. (Shane Benjamin/Durango Herald)
Taylor’s daughters and grandchildren have helped her through the years. At one point, four generations were working on festive windows together.
With an end in sight, Taylor has encouraged her daughters to take over for her once she decides to quit, but they’ve expressed little interest in working without her, she said.
She hopes her current painting partner, Diana Crawford, will fill in in her absence.
“She’s taken over pretty good,” Taylor said. “I didn’t give her the business or nothing like that, but I said, ‘Go for it.’ Because there’s a lot of people that paint and they don’t paint very good.”
As she nears six decades of work, Taylor still enjoys making her way downtown around the holidays.
“My heart’s at the corner of Ninth Street and Main Avenue because that was downtown, that was where everything happened,” she said.
But she will appreciate no longer having to draw Santa and his reindeer.
“That’s a bunch of work trying to paint all those deer. You’ve got to harness them and everything,” Taylor said.
For her last piece, some have suggested holding a lottery to decide.
Taylor is keeping her options open, including the date.
“I could paint one in July – Christmas in July,” she said.
Arts & Entertainment
The painting spans the entirety of the Fisherman’s Market storefront on 7th Avenue in Eugene. On the right, a salty sea captain rides a salmon like a cowboy among autumn leaves swirling in the wind. On the left, another salmon leaps from the water, wearing a football helmet and holding a football like a determined running back. Further to the left is a character that window-artist Leif Lorenzen named “Franken-fish.” He says Fisherman’s Market, his first window-painting client, wanted something that said football season, autumn, and salmon.
Originally from Southern California and a self-taught artist, Lorenzen says he’s always loved to draw. As a boy, he tells me, he “never stopped drawing,” and he particularly loves anime and landscapes. Window painting has allowed Lorenzen to live on his art for 15 years.
“Window painting is kind of like my medicine,” he says. “I came to window painting to provide for my family. I used to be a starving artist but now I’m a working artist.”
Lorenzen has a handful of Eugene clients and he says new business typically comes from word-of-mouth. Autumn and winter, with the change of seasons and the approaching holidays, is his busiest time. Lorenzen updates some clients’ windows monthly, some seasonally, with a typical job taking a few days.
“I want it to be valuable,” he says. “It’s a functional art. It’s a lot of work.”
Lorenzen comes up with all his own images, and he says he aims for figurative work that reads easily from a passing car. “Big, fun, fluid,” he says, adding, “I love working with a client to develop a design.”
The imagery is first drawn on the windows freehand. Lorenzen then fills it in, first with white and then with color, with a latex-acrylic blend paint. “Basically house paint,” he says.
Lorenzen explains that a “cartoon style lends itself to window painting,” and painting on windows—as opposed to canvas, something he uses for his personal, “much darker” art—is both “unforgiving and forgiving at the same time.”
“Window painting is very different,” Lorenzen says.
While on a job, Lorenzen frequently has to step back to take in the whole image, and while some painters pride themselves on being fast, he likes to take his time.
Window painters have different specialties, with some mastering Christmas scenes (snow, ribbons, lace), for example, or as is the case with another local window painter, Oregon Duck signage.
Unfortunately, Lorenzen says, window painting is a bit of a dying art. There was a time when window painting was “the only option” when a business wanted to advertise, he says.
But there is also a positive side to the new trend in digital graphics: anyone can make digital signage, but window art is one of a kind.
Standing in front of Fisherman’s Market with Lorenzen, his white painter’s clothes spackled with layers of brightly colored paint, you can see his work adding a charming, touched-by-human-hands feel to the Fisherman’s Market atmosphere.
To hire Leif Lorenzen, he prefers that clients call him directly at 541/735-5683.
Lorenzen’s Franken-fish tableau was updated for Thanksgiving and now Christmas.
One thought on “Holiday Window Painting”
Laurie says:
Wow…Orrin I really like the big, bold colorful window painting that you do. It has been really effective in attracting customers to my store and I get a lot of positive comments. Thank You so much =)
