For his debut show at Louis Vuitton two years ago in Paris, Pharrell Williams embroidered miniature versions of Henry Taylor portraits on his suits and accessories. “Henry is a genius,” Williams said at the time. So when Vogue decided to put a painting of Williams on one of its covers this month, we asked Taylor, an artist with a singular, ineffable cool, to do it. (This marks the fifth time in the past eight years Vogue has commissioned an artist to do a painting for a cover.) There was no time for a portrait sitting, but Taylor can paint from memory, and he’d met the designer in Paris, at Williams’s first Louis Vuitton show.
“I’m talking truth today,” Taylor tells me when we meet on Zoom to discuss the process. He’s in his studio on Pico Boulevard in Downtown Los Angeles. It’s noon there, and he’s just finished his avocado-toast breakfast and is smoking a joint. “I’m a Rasta, man. I woke up playing Bob Marley.” Taylor has a hipness to him. “He knows himself,” says Williams. He just gets it.”
I ask Taylor why he included the words “Human Made” on Williams’s baseball cap in the Vogue cover portrait. “That’s what we need today, more hu-man-i-ty and,” he says, pausing and then continuing with a big grin, “less in-san-i-ty.” He’s hugely playful, and sings or growls the words. “Like Edgar Allan Poe said, ‘I became insane with long intervals of sanity.’ Sometimes people wait till the weekend to get crazy, and you might want to get crazy on a Monday instead of a Sunday, but you can’t because on Sunday you’re supposed to go to church. Yes, but then you’ve got Saturday.” What about Saturday? I ask. “That’s when you em-bellish!” Taylor is happy to share his rhythmic non sequiturs with whomever he’s talking to. His paintings are much the same—figurative, alive on the canvas, and totally unpredictable.
Born in 1958 in Ventura, California, Taylor is the youngest of eight children, which earned him the right to nickname himself Henry the Eighth. In the ’70s, he wanted to be a fashion designer. “All my brothers had style, and my father did too. But my mama had badass style. When she walked into the church, they’d say, ‘Oooo-o-o-o, look at Cora.’ ” Taylor himself is stylish in a very unassuming way. His father, a house painter, was identified on Taylor’s birth certificate as an artist, and Taylor graduated from the California Institute of the Arts while simultaneously working at a public psychiatric hospital. He’s now represented by the powerhouse gallery Hauser Wirth, and he’s had shows everywhere, most recently, a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. In one way or another, much of his output is portraiture.
He has an extraordinary ability to capture the essence of his subject, and his subjects are everybody—family, friends, homeless people, people he sees at parties, sports figures.
Taylor had never painted Williams before this cover. “I don’t normally do commissions,” Taylor says. “What was the other one? Barack Obama asked me to make a painting for Michelle’s birthday. He didn’t ask for a portrait, but I did one.” His Michelle, 2023, was shown in the recent “Flight into Egypt” show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. While thinking about his portrait of Williams, he decided to “keep it simple and soulful”—words he had recently read in an obituary for Roberta Flack. “Sometimes simple is best, and that’s what I ended up doing,” he says.
“What I connected with was the fact that he grew up close to a beach. I grew up close to the beach. He grew up skateboarding—I didn’t skateboard that much, but all my friends did, and a lot of my friends surfed, and I kneeboarded a little. I thought about that, but I didn’t want to overthink it.”
Taylor proceeds to tell me he was “thinking about the masses” as he made this portrait. Like Vogue’s many millions of readers? I ask. He ignores that: “Not all the masses wear glasses, but I put him in a pair.” Taylor did three or four paintings of Williams—he can’t quite remember how many—before he landed on the one that is a cover of this month’s issue. He shows me a different, small canvas, completely filled with a face in semi-profile. “I ended up scratching that. It was a little bit too neb-u-lous!” He continues: “I like to be lost. First, I want to get all the way out there. Then, it’s like cleaning your closet. You pull all the junk out, and it’s all on the floor, and then you got to rearrange it. You know what I mean?”