Frank Arnott St.Aubyn Taylor was born to a humble shoe salesclerk mother and a policeman father on the small Caribbean island of Barbados. Frank’s early appreciation for fine craftsmanship was formed from watching his father bring derelict pieces of mahogany wood into brilliant works of furniture. He later came to appreciate the value of careful observation and core representational skills from a British art teacher, Michael Burton, while attending Harrison College, the premier boys’ secondary school on the island.

Having left that institution with more than enough academic qualifications to walk into just about any art school or university in the United Kingdom, and with the added prospects of possible football (soccer) leagues’ drafting — having been a national and international youth football representative for Barbados — Frank made the critical decision to forego those opportunities and wait for the remote chance to go to the United States where he knew he would need to start over from scratch.

That break came after a fateful chance meeting with artist Jacob Lawrence who just happened to be in Barbados and visiting his sister-in-law and her husband. At the time, Frank and his then-girlfriend (now his wife of 34 years) were renting the residence’s basement apartment. Frank was introduced to Jacob Lawrence who gave him a mini-critique of the small number of painting on hand to show. One of those paintings happened to be ‘NO SMILES, NO FULL BOWL’, a 32inch by 40inch derivative representation of a highly-emaciated, famine-ravaged, starving Ethiopian child holding an empty bowl on a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes cereal box.

Jacob Lawrence gave Frank his contact information and implored him to seek entry to universities in the US — which he did, with no success.

Then a chance perusal of the American Artist magazine classifieds revealed that the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was offering a full scholarship to Foreign students on a competitive basis for entry in the fall of 1984. Frank put a portfolio of slides together, submitted his application, and requested a referral letter from Mr. Lawrence, as invited.

August 1984, and Frank was on a plane bound for Philadelphia and the renowned Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Multiple awards, scholarships, and accolades onward; fate would play another wonderful miracle in Frank’s life in that none other than Jacob Lawrence was the Commencement Speaker at his graduation from PAFA in 1988. Prof. Lawrence did not initially recognize that it was Frank whom he had met in Barbados six years prior, and through whose inspiration this wonderful artistic journey had started.

The synchronicity of fate…

…And here’s to “paying it forward”, brother Jacob Lawrence.

In addition to his traditional Fine Arts studies at PAFA, Frank went on to attend and graduate from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a B.F.A in Cinema and Television, and later from California State University, Northridge with an M.A in Mass Communications with a concentration in Screenwriting.