New York Escorts: Henry Taylor Paints A Picture
Mr. Taylor conflates abstraction and realism in his work, giving it the feeling of bluntness (and mischief) found in someone like Alex Katz, but the way he hunts down his subjects transforms his practice into a process of earnest documentation. A number of superficial factors, however, have branded him an “outsider artist”—he’s black, he grew up poor, he paints prostitutes and drug users, he is a seriously prolific curser, he didn’t finish art school until he was in his 30s, and he didn’t get his work shown in a gallery until a decade after that, when he had a 10-year stint working as a psychiatric nurse at a California state hospital. Mr. Taylor and the people close to him admonish the label. (“Motherfuck,” he said when I mentioned “outsider.” “I say to hell with all that shit. Some Rauschenberg shit can look like outsider shit and vice versa. Fuck yeah, man.”) But he’s also an artist in demand. In addition to …
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