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Lot Essay
Based in downtown Los Angeles, Henry Taylor brings friends, family and passers-by to vivid life with his fuid, vigorous brushwork. My Brother Gene the Former Tunnel Rat (2010) displays a typically sharp sense of detail, symbolism and personal warmth. Gene sits across from the viewer at an outdoor table; a road and a Wal-Mart are visible in the background. He gazes of to the side at a large light bulb that hovers in space, its cartoonish yellow glow echoed in the whites of his eyes and his gold bracelet. In front of him, seemingly on the table, a loosely painted soldier in green fatigues crawls through mud. A ’tunnel rat’ was one of the American GIs who performed dangerous underground missions during the Vietnam war, sent into Viet Cong tunnel systems to kill enemy soldiers and plant explosives. In Taylor’s painting, it is as if Gene’s reminiscence has animated the world around him: he is the remembered soldier scrambling across the table; the glowing bulb might fgure as his torch, or the idea at the heart of a retold story. We are engaged in rich
conversation, in memories made visual. Taylor’s bright and balanced attention to all walks of life is partly informed by the decade he spent working, while also studying at CalArts, as a psychiatric assistant at the Camarillo State Hospital for the mentally ill. Here he began to draw and paint his patients, and the boundaries between art and daily life began to dissolve. ’I learned not to dismiss anybody,’ he has said of this time. ’It just made me a little more patient, a little more empathetic. It taught me to embrace a lot of things. A lot of people will avoid a person who doesn’t appear normal, but I’m not like that’ (H. Taylor, quoted in K. Rosenberg, ’Henry Taylor on His Profoundly Empathetic Early Portraits of Psychiatric Patients,’ Artspace.com, April 2, 2016). The Tunnel Rats’ nihilist motto might have been Non Gratum Anus Rodentum – ’Not Worth a Rat’s Ass’ – but Taylor’s poised, sensitive painting drinks in its
subject with the sense that all existence is to be celebrated.
conversation, in memories made visual. Taylor’s bright and balanced attention to all walks of life is partly informed by the decade he spent working, while also studying at CalArts, as a psychiatric assistant at the Camarillo State Hospital for the mentally ill. Here he began to draw and paint his patients, and the boundaries between art and daily life began to dissolve. ’I learned not to dismiss anybody,’ he has said of this time. ’It just made me a little more patient, a little more empathetic. It taught me to embrace a lot of things. A lot of people will avoid a person who doesn’t appear normal, but I’m not like that’ (H. Taylor, quoted in K. Rosenberg, ’Henry Taylor on His Profoundly Empathetic Early Portraits of Psychiatric Patients,’ Artspace.com, April 2, 2016). The Tunnel Rats’ nihilist motto might have been Non Gratum Anus Rodentum – ’Not Worth a Rat’s Ass’ – but Taylor’s poised, sensitive painting drinks in its
subject with the sense that all existence is to be celebrated.