I’ve been working on my large painting, as I have noted in the past few posts here. I decided to take a few moments this morning to explore one of my favorites sites at the Foundation for Self-Taught Artists, just to browse for a bit to maybe clear my mind before jumping into today’s work. I always love browsing the work here, feeling a real affinity with the artists here who often followed a circuitous route to their artistic lives and their personal visions .
As I clicked through the work, a greenish colored landscape caught my eye. Called The Hills of Old Wyoming, it immediately reminded me of the piece on which I was working. I mean, there are obvious differences in the composition and the manner in which it was rendered, but there was something familiar in the manner, the rhythm, in which the artist portrayed the landscape– the hills, the trees and the roads. I understood his vision in much the same way I understand and see my own. Makes me feel that there is a commonality of perception in the rhythm of the landscape that compells some, like this artist, Joseph Yoakum, and others, such as myself, to put down how they perceive the world around them.
Here is a little biographical background from the Foundation’s site:
1890–1972, lived and worked in Chicago, Illinois
Joseph Yoakum arrived at art in his later years, making approximately 2,000 small-scale drawn landscapes in the last decade of his life. Unlike many self-taught artists, he enjoyed at least a modest amount of appreciation and remuneration from the art world before he died in 1972. While much of Yoakum’s biographical information cannot be verified, he was likely born in 1890 in Missouri to parents of African, French, and Cherokee descent (although he claimed he was born in 1888, in Arizona, to a Navajo family). The artist said that, at age nine, he ran away to join the circus and later traveled the world as a billposter. Upon his return as to the United States, he settled first in Missouri and finally in Chicago. He began drawing in the 1950s, and in 1967 his imaginary landscapes came to the attention of the Hairy Who and Imagist circle of the Art Institute of Chicago. Artists Ray Yoshida, Jim Nutt, and Whitney Halstead praised and promoted Yoakum, who was granted a solo show at the Whitney Museum shortly before his death in 1972.
A proud world traveler and a deeply spiritual man whose beliefs embraced both Christianity and Navajo animism, Yoakum instilled in his work elements of travelogue and revelation. Usually rendered in ballpoint pen and colored pencil, and then buffed to a shine with toilet paper, these evocative drawings feature a refined color sensitivity, a sublime sense of compositional balance and symmetry, and a sinuous organic line. Most of his drawings include inscriptions indicating the location of the drawn scenes, though the depicted landscapes bear no resemblance to the actual named locations.
Redtree Times 