Most visual artists stick to a primary surface. Jaeden Taylor is not like most artists.

The Merrimack Valley High School junior has designed gnomes adorned with three-dimensional beards and has sold painted rocks that customers use as paperweights.

Even when Taylor sticks to a conventional 2-D canvas, her work combines multiple media and often includes three-dimensional elements. In one of the works that will become a component of her advanced placement art portfolio, Taylor crafts a blue room in which a mermaid swims through a coral reef, employing watercolors for the base, colored pencil and oil pastels for the details, and cutouts of other drawings for the fish.

“I like to include a lot of different mediums into my work because it shows the different textures and elements of art very well that sometimes you can’t do with one certain medium,” she said.

In a world where talented young artists can fly under the radar compared to star athletes, Taylor has distinguished herself in recent years for both her level of skill and the distinctiveness of her approach.

“She almost narrates a story through her artwork,” said Merrimack Valley art teacher Savanna Derby. “Some artworks you look at and you say, ‘Oh, that’s a beautiful landscape’ or ‘That’s a really nice portrait of whoever.’”

With Taylor, “You can read a story without reading the words through her work,” said Derby, who first met Taylor when she was a freshman in an introductory art class.

Taylor is soft-spoken and easygoing, according to those who work closely with her, but one should not conflate those traits with her approach to her work.

The first thing Derby noticed about her star student as a freshman: the intensity of the focus she brings to her craft.

“In anything that she chose she just was determined to get it done and do it the right way,” Derby said. “That’s never changed.”

Taylor’s AP art portfolio investigates how childhood imagination influences children’s perception of different experiences.

Early in her own childhood, Taylor’s imagination began to emerge on the page.

“I remember this big box of crayons that I used to always draw pictures of my family and pets and stuff,” said Taylor, who spent her early years in Penacook before moving to Loudon.

In middle school, she started to grow more serious as an artist, but it was what happened two years ago that really transformed her belief about how far art could take her.

When a family member saw a Facebook post that Twiggs Gallery in Boscawen was looking for a new high school student to help out and learn, Taylor leaped at the opportunity. Since then, she has worked closely with Adele Sanborn, the owner of the gallery, helping out with retail and shadowing Sanborn, who is herself a multimedia artist.

“She’s taught me how you don’t have to stick to one thing and you can combine several things and it doesn’t have to be one layer,” Taylor said of Sanborn. “A lot of her work is multi-layers on top of each other, which I think is super cool.”

The relationship with Sanborn has altered not just Taylor’s approach in the studio, but also her professional ambitions.

“Before working here, I wasn’t really sure if an art career was something that I would be able to pursue,” Taylor said. “But working here I’ve been able to meet a ton of people that have made their dreams not only be a hobby.”

With Twiggs scheduled to close next month, Taylor hopes to get a job at the craft store Michael’s, as well as potentially help out at Kimball Jenkins during the summers.

At Twiggs, Taylor has fallen in love, in particular, with teaching, through monthly demonstrations she helps lead at the gallery. After attending art school, she is considering becoming an elementary school art teacher.

It’s a path that would make Derby, herself a Merrimack Valley High alumna, proud.

“It takes a strong person today in this world to go from high school and make that conscious choice to want to teach and teach within a field that is not always respected as much as sports or as much as even sometimes theater,” Derby said. “Art is sometimes the lower man on the totem pole and I think it takes a big person to want to do that.”

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.