Camarillo Drawings, 1988-95 

Narrator: In the late eighties and early nineties, Taylor worked the night shift at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. The hospital has since closed. At the time, it was home to adults with developmental disabilities, and treated people with mental illness and substance abuse disorders. Taylor frequently drew while working with clients. 

Henry Taylor: I was what they call a psychiatric technician. And they're someone who's trained in nursing and psych. And anyway, when I began working on the units, I just started to draw because there was time, there was moments when you would just sit in the day hall with the clients. And late in the evening, it was a time when things just slowed down. And after dinner, so a lot of times at various times of day, I would just usually draw, bring out a notepad. Sometimes I would do a, say a one-to-one with a patient who had to be placed in five point restraints. And then you have drawings like that where I've drawn people who I've had to just document, say every 15 minutes. And I'm sitting there anyway, so.

It brings back a lot of memories and it seems like I was able to spend some time on a few of them. You know what I mean? Some of them are, seem to be quick and fast. Others slow as if someone was there for a reasonable amount of time.

Narrator: Taylor was also a student at this time. He studied art and journalism at Oxnard College, and then got an BFA at the California Institute for the Arts.