The Water Nebula

Tara McPherson is an American contemporary artist exploring concepts surrounding the human condition. With a focus on powerful female archetypes, her otherworldly characters hold a compelling tension in their gaze. Inspired by astrophysics, nature, mythology, comics, music, love, loss, and good old life experience. Her portraits delve into the realms of our psychological states, giving us a peek into the complexities of the human psyche. She has exhibited her paintings and serigraphs internationally in galleries and museums. Named the crown princess of poster art by ELLE Magazine, she has created numerous music posters for bands such as Beck, The Pixies, and Metallica. She has worked with Sony Pictures Animation doing character designs & creative development for an animated feature production. Her array of art also includes a variety of designer toys with KidRobot, painted comic covers for DC Vertigo, advertising illustrations for Wyden+Kennedy, Barton F Graf, Publicis, and Bernstein Andrulli. She taught in the Illustration department at Parsons in NYC, and has done many painting workshops in museums and universities worldwide. In 2011 Tara co-founded The Cotton Candy Machine gallery and art boutique with her partner Sean Leonard. The gallery ran from 2011 to 2016 in a former fire department in the Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints. The Cotton Candy Machine is a fine art archival print publisher and online gallery for select contemporary artists, founded by Tara McPherson and Sean Leonard in 2011. It serves as the official online print store for Tara McPherson, as well as doing special events and pop ups across the globe. All of our archival pigment prints are produced right here in our studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We print on the highest quality etching and watercolor papers made in France, Germany and the USA. Our serigraphs and UV prints are produced in collaboration with a variety of talented screen printers and print houses around the US as well. We began as a storefront gallery and art boutique from 2011 to 2016 in a former fire station in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. The Cotton Candy Machine held a variety of art exhibitions, workshops, and events by a plethora of contemporary artists, curated by Tara McPherson. It then transitioned into a thriving online store and print publisher in 2017, serving as Tara McPherson's official print shop, publishing archival fine art editions, selling limited edition art prints, posters, apparel, books, toys and more. All the while holding onto its roots