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Archive for the ‘Outsider Art’ Category

The Art Brut of Adolf Wolfli/ A Revisit

Posted in Favorite Things, Outsider Art, tagged , , on July 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I ran the post below a number of years back and thought I’d revisit it and add a video slideshow that shows a bit more of Wolfli’s works accompanied by music that he composed.

Fascinating stuff…

I’ve written here before about some of my favorite Outsider artists, those untrained artists who follow their obsessive need for expression even as they suffer hardships such as illness, extreme poverty and mental disabilities.  People like Martin Ramirez, the Mexican-born artist who was committed to an asylum in his thirties and spent the rest of his life, 30+ years, locked away as he created an amazing intricately designed world in his art.

There was another artist years before Ramirez whose road was very similar and who work was as deeply designed and engaging.  It was the Swiss artist Adolf Wolfli who was born in 1864 and died in 1930, about the time Ramirez was committed.  Wolfli was considered one of the first acknowledged Art Brut artists, as Outsiders are called in Europe and, like Ramirez, he had a difficult life that ended with him living the greater part of his life locked away.

Wolfli, an orphan at the age of 10, was physically and sexually abused throughout his childhood.  He suffered from severe mental illness which manifested itself in violent outbursts and hallucinations.  It was this and a series of child molestation charges that led to his committal in 1895.  He was about 31 years old.  He never left.

He began to draw at some point during his life in custody, it soon becoming a true obsession as his inticate drawings covered every scrap of paper he could lay his hands on.  Walter Morgenthaler, a doctor at the psychiatric hospital who documented Wolfli case in a book, wrote this about the extent of Wolfli’s obsession:  Every Monday morning Wölfli is given a new pencil and two large sheets of unprinted newsprint. The pencil is used up in two days; then he has to make do with the stubs he has saved or with whatever he can beg off someone else. He often writes with pieces only five to seven millimetres long and even with the broken-off points of lead, which he handles deftly, holding them between his fingernails. He carefully collects packing paper and any other paper he can get from the guards and patients in his area; otherwise he would run out of paper before the next Sunday night. At Christmas the house gives him a box of coloured pencils, which lasts him two or three weeks at the most.

Wolfli’s work incorporated musical notations that were woven into the designs, an odd looking notation that seemed purely ornamental but was later proven to be an actual  idiosyncratic notation sysytem that could indeed be played.  Wolfli would sometimes play the music on a paper trumpet he had crafted.

Wolfli produced a prodigious body of work in his years in the asylum, including a semi-autobiographical epic that was a massive 45 volumes in size.  It consisted of over 25000 pages and 1600 illustrations.  His work has been largely kept together as a collection which is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland.  There is also the Adolf Wolfli Foundation which was formed in 1975 to bring his work to the attention of the public through education on and exhibitions of his works.

Like many of these artists about which I write, Wolfli’s work is new to me.  But it is so immediately grabbing in its design and its harmony of color and form that I am enthralled by it.  When I clicked on the Google images page for his work, there was such a gorgeous continuity that ran through every image on the page that I found it hard to choose which image to explore first.  Such beauty revealed in the dark recesses of a life spent locked away.

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Herbert Singleton/ Glad You Dead You Rascal You

Posted in Folk Art, Influences, Music, Outsider Art, Video, tagged , , , , , , on April 30, 2013| 1 Comment »

Singleton Glad You Dead You Rascal YouSome of the first things I ever did artistically as a somewhat mature person were bas-relief  carvings.  In a way, it formed the technique that I adopted as a painter.  I suppose that’s why I am so drawn to carvings when I come across them.  There’s something very appealing to me in the idea of a flat surface that has this raised, tactile surface. Like a painting that is also available in braille.  I can imagine the artist running his hands over the piece as he works, the ridges and valleys sliding gently underneath in a most comforting way.

Smithsonian American Art Museum - Donald W. Reynolds CenterI recently stumbled  across the work of Herbert Singleton ,  a New Orleans folk artist who made wonderful and colorful carvings such as the piece at the top, Glad You Dead You Rascal You, which depicts a New Orleans funeral procession.  Singleton’s life story is similar in may ways with other folk artists– a life filled with missteps and violence, run ins with the law and addictions.  He spent the better part of 14 years in prison and died in 2007 from lung cancer at the age of 62.  But in his short time here, Singleton created a powerful body of  carved work that documented his world and goes well beyond the label of folk art or self-taught art.  It is not benign work .  It often rails against social injustice and hypocrisy with great gusto.

I was first attracted to some of his Voodoo Protection Stumps, such as the one shown just below, which are carved from  half of a log with  multiple colorful faces emerging from one side and the bark remaining on the backside.  There is an immediacy and vibrancy to the images and color that make them really ring out. Singleton’s work is such a great example of   an artist who will not be held captive to their circumstance,   will not succumb to the hardships and obstacles that that they face.  They use their life and whatever means they can muster to express their place in this world.

SingletonVoodooProtectionStump 2

The piece at the top of this post, Glad You Dead You Rascal You, was based on the song You Rascal You made popular by the great  Louis Armstrong in the early 1030’s.  Here ‘s a Betty Boop cartoon from 1932 that features the song in  an interesting mix of cartoon and live action with Armstrong and his band.  Hard to believe this is from before my dad was born on this day back in 1933.  Happy birthday to my old man.

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Chester Cornett’s Special Talent

Posted in Favorite Things, Folk Art, Neat Stuff, Outsider Art, tagged , , on January 19, 2013| 25 Comments »

Chester Cornett CrucifixChester Cornett CrucifixI came across an image of a hand-carved crucifix that caught my eye.  it had rough craved ribs and was painted in a haphazard fashion and adorned with human hair.  The photo made it look small and intimate but it was huge, about eight  feet tall and four feet wide.  It would be a truly dynamic thing to see.  I knew nothing of its maker,  Chester Cornett.  This wild expression, while effecting in its presence,  didn’t give me any real idea of the story behind the name or of the nature of his true special talent.

You see, Chester Cornett was born and raised as a traditional chairmaker from the hills of Kentucky, learning at the knees of his grandfather and father.  He was born in 1912 and died in 1981, living a life filled with hardship as the  world surged progressively into the modern era,  moving further and further away from the need for the handmade.  But Chester persisted, perhaps because he knew no other way or because his special talent, his genius, was too great to forsake.

Chester Cornett Rocing Chair BookcaseHe made all sorts of chairs, simply built traditional chairs and rockers.  But it was when he moved beyond that form that his genius manifested itself.  Folding chairs with eight legs.  Rocking chairs with bookcases built around them.  They were masterfully crafted with innovative joinery and intricate engineering.  Just amazing creations.

I’m just learning about Chester Cornett so I’m not going into much depth here.  There’s not a wealth of info out there outside of a film, Handcarved, from 1981, and a book that features him among other mountain craftsmen, Craftsmen of the Cumberlands.  But I find his work and his life captivating.  There’s something special in seeing ingenuity show itself in unlikely places and conditions.  And Cornett seems to me an unlikely genius that deserves greater examination.

I like this exchange from the book, Craftsmen of the Cumberlands:

Chester Cornett Snake Chair“Do you think it takes a special talent to be a chairmaker?” I asked Chester. 

“I don’t b’lieve so,” he said. 

“You think anybody could be a chairmaker?” 

“No, I don’t b’lieve just anybody could… too hard a work.” 

“Does it take some special skill?” 

“Yes sir, it does. It takes a skill specially for, uh, you got to learn how to use that drawin’ knife—use it just right to take off hick’ry bark with or whatever you’re making.” (Though other chairmakers used a drawing knife much less frequently and for fewer tasks than Chester did.) 

“Can anyone learn how to use a drawing knife?” 

“I’d say so, excepting uh, you got to learn to get interested in anything to learn it… you have to learn to get interested in a thing like that before you could learn it. And anyway, I b’lieve anyone could learn how to use a drawin’ knife and do that work.” 

“Anybody could learn how to be a chairmaker, then?” 

“Well, yes, they could, but they’d have to learn to be interested in that first.”

Maybe that’s the whole point of life– finding that thing that we can learn to be interested in.

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The Treasure of Ulysses Davis

Posted in Favorite Things, Folk Art, Neat Stuff, Outsider Art, tagged , , , , on August 6, 2012| 2 Comments »

Ulysses Davis- Lost Tribe in the Swamp with Alligators

I recently came across the work of another folk/outsider artist whose work really resonates with me.  It is by Ulysses Davis, a barber who lived in Savannah, Georgia, passing away in 1990 at the age of 76.  His medium was woodcarving and over the course of his life he created a very diverse body of work that had both the simple and free feel of the Outsider artist’s vision and the compositional sophistication of a fine artist.  His subjects covered a wide spectrum,  ranged from the fantastic to straight portraiture including a series of busts of all of  the US Presidents up to the year of his death. Very striking stuff.

Ulysses Davis- No No Bird

He  seldom sold his work, saying “They’re my treasure. If I sold these, I’d be really poor.”   As a result, his work never garnered the exposure or the recognition it deserved although he did receive a few honors before his death, his work showing in an important 1982 exhibit of modern Black Folk Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.  In the years since, the American Folk Art Museum did mount a retrospective of his lifework in a 2009 exhibit called The Treasure of Ulysses Davis,  the title playing off of Davis’ own words on his work.

And what a treasure it is, one that we are fortunate enough to at least share in images and in a few museums.  Beautiful work with a unique vision…

Ulysses Davis- Get Off My Back

 

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William Edmondson’s Vision

Posted in Favorite Things, Folk Art, Influences, Outsider Art, tagged , , on June 15, 2012| 2 Comments »

I was out in the driveway with some old pieces of stone when I heard a voice telling me to pick up my tools and start to work on a tombstone. I looked up in the sky and right there in the noon daylight He hung a tombstone out for me to make.

—–William Edmondson, on his inspiration to begin sculpting

****************

My last post was about the grand paintings of the Renaissance era, beautifully crafted pieces from painters who were extensively trained under master artisans so that they could capture the religious spirit that was the subject and inspiration for most of the work of that time.  But that post made me think about how others, less schooled and less well equipped, translate this same inspiration into forms.

That  thought brought me quickly to William Edmondson,  a man born in 1874 in Tennessee to former slaves.  Edmondson worked in a number of jobs throughout his life, losing his job as a hospital orderly in the late 1920’s when he was in his mid-50’s.  It was at this point that he had the vision he describes above which led to him to begin sculpting for two African-American cemeteries in the Nashville area.

 Using handmade tools such as a chisel made from a railroad spike and working on discarded chunks of stone from building sites, it soon became clear that Edmondson had a true affinity for capturing the essence of figures in stone with forms that were spare but elegant with subtle shaping.  I see a simplified elegance in much of his work that cannot be taught, that is simply an expression of the artist’s self and spirit.

Edmondson sculpted for the next couple of decades until his death in 1951, gaining acclaim as perhaps the finest American folk sculptor of the century.  He was the first African-American artist to be featured  in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1937 and his work is still celebrated today for its extraordinary qualities.

Edmondson’s called each of his sculptures “miracles,”  something that strikes very close to home for me.  I think it’s that feeling of having something emerge from your hand that seems to transcend what you are as a human, something that is more than the sum of your own parts.  I have sometimes been fortunate enough to have experienced this and have felt that same sense of wonder at this miracle of creation.  It’s a wonderful moment that serves as  inspiration to continue to push forward with the work, to continue the inward journey.  It’s a true  pleasure to see Edmondson’s inspirations come to life.

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The Art Brut of Adolf Wolfli

Posted in Favorite Things, Folk Art, Outsider Art, tagged , , , , on April 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’ve written here before about some of my favorite Outsider artists, those untrained artists who follow their obsessive need for expression even as they suffer hardships such as illness, extreme poverty and mental disabilities.  People like Martin Ramirez, the Mexican-born artist who was committed to an asylum in his thirties and spent the rest of his life, 30+ years, locked away as he created an amazing intricately designed world in his art. 

There was another artist years before Ramirez whose road was very similar and who work was as deeply designed and engaging.  It was the Swiss artist Adolf Wolfli who was born in 1864 and died in 1930, about the time Ramirez was committed.  Wolfli was considered one of the first acknowledged Art Brut artists, as Outsiders are called in Europe and, like Ramirez, he had a difficult life that ended with him living the greater part of his life locked away.

Wolfli, an orphan at the age of 10, was physically and sexually, abused throughout his childhood.  He suffered from severe mental illness which manifested itself in vilent outbursts and hallucinations.  It was this and a series of child molestation charges that led to his committal in 1895.  He was about 31 years old.  He never left. 

He began to draw at some point during his life in custody, it soon becoming a true obsession as his inticate drawings covered every scrap of paper he could lay his hands on.  Walter Morgenthaler, a doctor at the psychiatric hospital who documented Wolfli case in a book, wrote this about the extent of Wolfli’s obsession:  Every Monday morning Wölfli is given a new pencil and two large sheets of unprinted newsprint. The pencil is used up in two days; then he has to make do with the stubs he has saved or with whatever he can beg off someone else. He often writes with pieces only five to seven millimetres long and even with the broken-off points of lead, which he handles deftly, holding them between his fingernails. He carefully collects packing paper and any other paper he can get from the guards and patients in his area; otherwise he would run out of paper before the next Sunday night. At Christmas the house gives him a box of coloured pencils, which lasts him two or three weeks at the most.

Wolfli’s work incorporated musical notations that were woven into the designs, an odd looking notation that seemed purely ornamental but was later proven to be an actual  idiosyncratic notation sysytem that could indeed be played.  Wolfli would sometimes play the music on a paper trumpet he had crafted. 

Wolfli produced a prodigious body of work in his years in the asylum, including a semi-autobiographical epic that was a massive 45 volumes in size.  It consisted of over 25000 pages and 1600 illustrations.  His work has been largely kept together as a collection which is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland.  There is also the Adolf Wolfli Foundation which was formed in 1975 to bring his work to the attention of the public through education on and exhibitions of his works.

Like many of these artists about which I write, Wolfli’s work is new to me.  But it is so immediately grabbing in its design and its harmony of color and form that I am enthralled by it.  When I clicked on the Google images page for his work, there was such a gorgeous continuity that ran through every image on the page that I found it hard to choose which image to explore first.  Such beauty revealed in the dark recesses of a life spent locked away.

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Lee Godie, French Impressionist

Posted in Folk Art, Neat Stuff, Outsider Art, tagged , , , , , on April 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I have a real soft spot in my heart for self-taught and outsider artists, the untrained artists who are driven to create by forces that no one truly understands.  There is something about their passionate need for expression that really fills in the voids of the work they do,  making their sometimes unsophisticated creations sing as a reflection of the artist.  Many of these artists have interesting stories or lives that have been overtaken by their need to create their work.  One of these is the late Lee Godie.

Godie (1908-1994) showed up on the steps of the of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 60’s and for the better part of the next three decades was a fixture there, hawking her rolled canvas paintings to museum-goers and art students.  Her work was often made in ballpoint pen and watercolor and depicted mainly figurative work, often fashionably attired people in a style resembling fashion plates.  Over the years,  her work and her persona became almost legendary in the Chicago area and there was a career retrospective of her work at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1992,  just two years before her death.

I mentioned her persona, which may have been the biggest part of her work. While little is known of her life before her years as an itinerant artist on the steps of the museum, she was a big personality.  Although not French and with work that was not of the Impressionist school of art, she called herself a French Impressionist and often attached the title to her name on the back of the canvases she painted.  It was actually a nod to the inspiration she got from the Imprssionist paintings she saw in the museum.  As she said of her favorite artist , “Renoir was the greatest artist of all time. He always said he painted beauty. Now I always try to paint beauty, but some people say my paintings aren’t beautiful. Well, I have a beauty in my mind, but it isn’t always easy to make paintings beautiful.”  

Like many Outsiders, Godie lived a hard and homeless life, often sleeping in the bus terminal or, when sales were good, in flophouses.  But it didn’t deter her search for beauty.  One of the interesting things she did was to take advantage of the bus terminal photobooth, taking a series of photos over the years of her in different personas, often in heavy stage makeup.  She would often touch-up these photos with the colors with which she painted, creating photos that in themselves are as much works of art as her paintings.

I didn’t know much about Lee Godie before stumbling across her work but there is something quite special in her work, a childishly naive yet full view of her world that reaches out beyond the surface.  Knowing a bit more of her story makes that sensation even more profound.

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