I’ve always been drawn to the work of self-taught artists and the way they synthesize their experience into their work, finding forms for their need for expression. There is a great freeness and rawness to much of the work of self-taught artists, an energy that is so electric that many well trained artists try to capture it in their own work. Expressionism is pretty much based on this energy.
This point is well made in Purvis of Overtown, a 2006 documentary made about outsider artist Purvis Young who lived his life in the Miami neighborhood called Overtown. Being not well educated and poor, Young found trouble at an early age and spent time in prison before pursuing the art that led him to some pretty spectacular heights before his death in 2010 at the age of 67, from diabetic complications. He has said that he was called to his art by a meeting with angels in a dream.
He basically lived much of his life in the warehouses where he painted, sleeping among the accumulated trash and eating junk food. His whole existence seemed to be driven by his need to create and he produced what appears to be a huge body of work. The work itself had that electric energy that I wrote of above, a blistering raw qualityand rhythm that marks it as authentic. It was not a contrivance for Young, not the product of some intellectual exercise. It was pure emotion and it can’t be replicated through style alone.
Here’s the trailer for the documentary Purvis of Overtown:
Redtree Times 