The maker of things
The Life of Dell Kinyon Taylor
The Boy Who Wanted More
Dell Kinyon Taylor grew up on a dairy farm in rural Idaho where little was wasted and everything had a purpose.
There was no electricity. Life revolved around work, weather, and necessity.
Dell often joked that he had spent enough time behind a shitty cows tails and working fields to know it wasn’t the life he wanted.
He escaped by making.
His mother taught him to sew and cook. An older Native woman living near the river taught him to weave wool and tan hides using their own brains.
Those lessons stayed with him.
So did another memory.
Dell attended a one-room schoolhouse where a single teacher taught every grade.
Years later, he still talked about her.
In a time when women wore dresses nearly every day, his teacher owned only three. They were plain, nearly identical, and worn year after year.
Dell never understood it.
Why choose so little when the world offered so much?
The question never left him.
A Different Way of Seeing
Dell saw value where others didn’t.
A discarded object wasn’t garbage.
A scrap of material wasn’t waste.
Paint left behind at school.
Metal headed for the trash.
Fabric too small for its original purpose.
Nothing was beneath consideration.
Part necessity and part instinct, he developed a habit of looking beyond what something was and seeing what it could become.
It was a perspective that would shape nearly everything he touched.
A Maker of Things
Dell disliked being called an artist.
He believed the word lost much of its meaning.
When asked what he was, his answer never changed.
"I am a maker of things, and the things I make are fine."
Paintings.
Jewelry.
Stained glass.
Clothing.
Textiles.
Furniture.
Gardens.
Architecture.
Entire rooms.
Making was not a profession.
It was simply how he moved through the world.
The Teacher
For decades, Dell worked as a high school art teacher.
Yet former students rarely begin by talking about art.
They remember conversations.
Questions.
Encouragement.
The feeling that someone was genuinely listening.
Again and again, former students tell the same story. When they brought Dell a problem, he helped them find their own way through it.
Many have forgotten the assignments.
Few have forgotten the teacher Mr. Taylor
The Show
After retiring from teaching, Dell publicly exhibited a body of work that had taken decades to create.
Not everyone welcomed it.
Members of the local city council reportedly criticized exhibition and dismissed the work as trash. They ultimately attempted to shut the show completely down.
The experience never left him.
For years afterward, Dell often referred to much of his own work the same way.
“Trash.”
Yet he never stopped.
The signatures largely disappeared.
The work remained inside the house.
While opinions came and went, Dell continued doing what he had always done.
Making things.
The Mantra
Among Dell's papers, one phrase appears again and again.
Written thousands of times over decades.
Almost like a prayer.
Almost like a discipline.
“Do not need.
Do not want.
Do not wish.
Do not expect.
Do not ask.
Do not intrude.
Do not talk too much.
WORK.
GIVE.”
No explanation was ever attached.
Only the words themselves.
Building A World
For most of his life, Dell built quietly.
One project led to another.
One collection led to another.
Ideas accumulated.
Materials accumulated.
Rooms changed.
The house changed.
What began as a place to live slowly became something else.
Few people have ever seen the fullness of it.
Fewer still understood what they were looking at.
Not because of any single object, but because of the scale of a life made visible.
Every room holds evidence of time, attention, and effort.
Taken together, they reveal something larger than a collection.
They reveal a man who spent his life creating the world he wanted to live in.
The Question
People often arrived expecting to see art.
Many leave asking themselves something else.
What am I doing with my time?
For nearly ninety years, Dell answered that question in the only way he knew how.
By making things.
The Great Kinyon is the result.