Keith J. Taylor was a nationally syndicated cartoonist and greeting card artist who in recent years drew cartoons oriented around breaking news for Chicago Public Square, a free daily email news briefing.
“Drawing was as natural and compulsive for him as breathing is for the rest of us,” said Chicago Public Square Publisher Charlie Meyerson. “The hardest part of working with Keith was deciding which of (his) many cartoons (that he submitted) were the best.”
Taylor, 72, died of complications from blood cancer Dec. 16 at Loyola Medical Center, said his daughter, Nell. A longtime Oak Park resident, Taylor also had COVID-19, his daughter said.
Keith Taylor (Family photo)
Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Taylor attended Evanston Township High School in 1967 before moving with his family to Champaign, where he graduated from Champaign High School in 1968.
Taylor received a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1973. After that, he took part in a fellowship for painting at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art in New York in 1974. He returned to Champaign-Urbana to earn a master of fine arts degree in printmaking in 1977.
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Taylor moved in 1977 to Chicago, where he worked for the next 13 years drawing original greeting cards and buttons for the Recycled Paper Greetings company. He also co-founded a printmaking workshop in Wicker Park called Hard Press Editions in 1977, and he would moonlight tending bar at many Chicago pubs and music venues from 1974 until 1996, including John Barleycorn, the Beat Kitchen and Holstein’s.
Taylor was a graphic designer for the Sharprint custom apparel firm in River West from 1991 until 1995, then for the Partners in Design graphic design firm in Westchester from 1995 until 2004. He worked as a desktop publisher for the Rosemont-based National Roofing Contractors Association from 2005 until retiring two weeks before his death.
Taylor started drawing cartoons in the 1980s, and contributed editorial cartoons to the Logan Square Free Press newspaper from 1982 until 1989. He also drew cartoons for advertisements for WFMT-FM — including ads for author Studs Terkel’s radio show — as well as for the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week In the early 1990s and for Public Works magazine from 2007 until 2009.
Taylor’s illustrations often were fairly simple in nature, with an economical use of lines and minimal shading. However, the images he produced were unmistakable.
After Taylor began drawing political cartoons critical of then-President Donald Trump, Meyerson asked Taylor in 2018 whether Taylor would be willing to make his editorial cartoons available to Chicago Public Square.
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“I had no idea what I was unleashing,” Meyerson recalled. “Keith generously said yes. And then he began sending me cartoons. And more cartoons. And more cartoons. A dozen a day wasn’t unusual. And they were all great — many of them turned around within minutes of my suggestions.”
Meyerson said Taylor often was well ahead of him when it came to being up on the news and developing cartoons in response.
“The upside of those occasions was that a cartoon Keith filed on a Tuesday would make perfect sense when the news (business) caught up with him on Thursday,” Meyerson said. “But, of course, by then Keith would have filed another couple of dozen cartoons.”
Taylor won several awards for his work, including a Peter Lisagor Award from the Chicago Headline Club for best illustration, and he earned the top spot in the Chicago Reader’s Best of Chicago poll for best visual artist. Taylor also was a co-honoree along with Meyerson for a Lisagor for best independent blog.
Taylor also produced four collections of political cartoons about Trump, each titled “Mostly Trump and Other Disasters.”
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Nell Taylor said her father was always thinking about drawing.
“He was never in my entire life without a pen,” she said. “Even, anytime we would be eating out anywhere with a paper tablecloth, he would be drawing on it.”
Karen Anderson, a longtime friend, recalled Taylor’s willingness to hand-draw Christmas cards for her own family, as well as her wedding invitation and her children’s birth announcements.
“He was such a generous person with his art and his creativity,” Anderson said. “He was really a sweet genius, and was a real regular guy who connected with people so much.”
Taylor was president of the Oak Park Art League from 2006 until 2011.
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In addition to his daughter, Taylor is survived by his wife of more than 45 years, Rhona; a son, Max; a sister, Lynn Tripoli Young; a brother, Gary; and a grandson.
Services were held.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
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