Taylor was so taken with the elder’s work that he kept retaking his class - until Jarvaise prodded him to attend CalArts.Īt that point, Taylor was in his 30s, working as a tech at Camarillo State, the father of two small children. Jarvaise’s work had appeared in the historic 1959 exhibition “ 16 Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York alongside iconic conceptualists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Taylor’s artistic turning point came under the tutelage of Jarvaise, a professor at Oxnard College. Read the comics closely and occasionally you’ll stumble into a frame that summons Taylor’s paintings: figures caught in peculiar scenarios against backdrops redolent of Southern California. The Hernandezes’ beloved “ Love and Rockets” comics are set amid Chicano punks in a fictional stand-in for Oxnard.

Indeed, Taylor and the Hernandez brothers have cut parallel paths. Taylor, as a general rule, avoids wearing any labels other than painter. In his catalog essay, Simpson describes Taylor as “John Fante with a brush.” Walker likes to call him “Cézanne from around the way.” “Henry is a real manipulator of imagery and materials. “The word and idea of portraiture is very reductive,” says Simpson of Taylor’s work. A 2006 canvas titled “Fatty” shows a man standing before a corner market wielding a can of Olde English as if it were a royal orb - homie as Holy Roman Emperor. Paintings might riff directly on Picasso’s bawdy “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or Modigliani’s languorous nudes others make subtler allusions. One such work opens the MOCA show: a nearly 12-foot-tall canvas of his brother Randy, who helped establish a chapter of the Panthers in Ventura, standing before a spectral figure of an animal that could be a panther.Įlsewhere, art history itself is up for dissection. In others, Taylor pays tribute to the ideas and aesthetics of the Black Panthers. In several paintings, the forms of prison architecture loom on the horizon, a reminder of the carceral state’s intrusions on Black life. You will inevitably confront social forces. In conversation, he offers it up with panache: “Henry THE EIGHTH!” he exclaims, brandishing a cigarette as if it were punctuation. The youngest of eight children born to a house painter and a domestic worker living in Oxnard, Taylor likes to refer to himself as “Henry the Eighth.” Like many Taylor portraits, it touches on multiple themes: the legacies of British painting and the politics of representation. It was inspired by a recent trip to England, when he spent a spell making work in the countryside. The painting shows the artist in profile, his left hand effetely raised. In a wry and elegant self-portrait painted last year, Taylor renders himself in royal robes, modeling a 400-year-old portrait of King Henry V of England that hangs at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In another, he scrutinizes Epic, his 2-year-old daughter with artist Liz Glynn, as she sits in a high chair - green peas dotting her bowl and the floor.

In a 2015 canvas titled “i’m yours,” he carries the gaze of a worried parent as he stands in the company of his older children, Jade and Noah. The Los Angeles painter, who is 64, makes regular appearances in his own work. The best depictions of Taylor, however, are self-portraits. Ideas come so quickly that he cuts them off with a refrain, “Know what I mean?” Hamza Walker, a curator who has known Taylor for a decade, says that if he were to create a portrait of the artist, he too would start with his words: “‘Know What I Mean’ - that’s what I would call my portrait of Henry.” Taylor’s conversation can meander from Philip Guston‘s late work to that time he met Bob Marley backstage at a concert. Of 20th century abstractionist James Jarvaise and comic book artists Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, he declares: “Those motherf- can draw!” Taylor gets gravelly when he wants to confide but can pierce a crowded room with a roaring “Girl! What’s UP!?!” Words are drawn out for impact and expletives dispensed as tokens of admiration. My portrait of Taylor would start with his voice and its cadences. If you were to paint a portrait of Henry Taylor, you might start with his smile: brilliant, devilish, inhabiting both the mouth and the eyes.

La moca museum