Tag: art brut

Imam Sucahyo

Imam Sucahyo,  “Nightmares”, Acrylic and Marker on Canvas, 2008, 50 x 78 Inches

Imam Sucahyo is a self-taught artist who was born in Tuban, a small city on the north east coast of East Java, Indonesia. His interest in art began after discovering a book in his school’s library about Affandi, Indonesia’s master painter known for his expressionist style.  After the deaths of his wife and mother, he moved to Surabaya, the capital city of East Java in 2014. There he met like-minded people and, through social media, Imam Sucahyo’s artwork attracted the followers of the Art Brut movement.

The intimacy of the subject in Imam Sucahyo’s “Nightmares” defies its own scale. Color, texture, and space merge to create a series of visual riddles. The feel of landscape, death and burial, a floating figure, red sky, horizontal figure at the top, and the encasement of the form in high contrast linear definition, all work together  in a feeling of earthy, somatic spirituality.

Color temperature evokes literal associations (earth, sky, blood) within an alternating visual tension and relief across the canvas in a lateral back and forth motion. The intuitive decisions about composition seem to be as much about discovery as invention…as if the image had always been there, just between consciousness and sleep.

Bob Hoke

Paintings by Bob Hoke

Bob Hoke’s‘ paintings on board are immediate, bizarre and rich in colour, lively portraits that live in the Outsider art world, a place outside the cultural mainstream, that are compelled to exist because the maker has to make, scratch, mark, bring colour to live without regard to art history and the gallery system.

He lives and sleeps art, along with his partner Therese Marie Nolan, in an old brick church on the banks of the Mississippi river. For decades he has been scrounging for found materials in skips to paint his vivid pictures – that are both chaotic and full of humour – that draw from a hard life of making, moving, trying to make paintings that exorcise his feelings and experiences. He now sells his works online directly to a global audience.

“I’m a bohemian dumpster divin outsider artist/painter. Aint got a lot of formal training. Been painting on and off most of my life. For the last 10 years I have been displaying my paintings on ebay. I paint approximately 30 to 40 paintings a month. Nothing the same but a common thread of chaos and humor. I live in an old church in downtown historic Hannibal, Missouri along the vast Mississippi river. I sleep and eat downstairs and paint upstairs.”- Bob Hoke

Concha Flores Vay

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Paintings by Concha Flores Vay

Concha Flores Vay is a self-taught artist from a small village in the province of Valladolid , Spain. She now lives in works in Alicante’s Province on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Her work can be found in private collections in Spain, Germany, Holland and Norway.

“I express myself through my fantasy and creativity. My art-style is very childlike, I love colour, I like to create something different, I don’t follow any trend, I do what I like and the best I can without going out of my art-style, my work is spontaneous.” -Concha Flores Vay

Jesse Reno

Paintings by Jesse Reno

Jesse Reno is a self-taught American painter and muralist, whose art is based on his interest in native and primitive societies. Reno himself terms his art as “neo-primitivism”.

Jesse Reno was born in Teaneck, New Jersey in 1974. He was born with an extreme fever, which caused severe damage to his optic nerve. Because of this, Reno spent almost his entire first year in a hospital, where doctors were trying to examine and evaluate all of the damages caused by the high temperature. As it turns out, fever affected blindspots in over half the visual field of his right eye, and left him with a lazy eye and bad vision.

All of these damages, as well as the chronic pain caused by the problems, affected his perception as a painter and an artist, but hasn’t stopped him to draw since he could hold a pencil. His damaged vision causes strange distortions in depth perception, forcing his to always stay close to his works while painting. In addition, Reno’s vision is sensitive to both light and color, caused by a high level of contrast. Jesse Reno’s different vision greatly shaped his art, both in a color pallet and in terms of depth within his paintings, murals and commissioned works.

Jean Dubuffet

Figurative Art of Jean Dubuffet

French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet was one of the most influential and prolific artists of the 20th century. The founder of an entire art movement, ‘Art Brut,’ Dubuffet tore down the boundaries of the established art world and opened art up to self-taught outsiders. Join us, as we take a look at one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was born on July 31, 1901, in Le Havre, France. Raised in a middle-class family of wholesale wine merchants, he began painting in 1918 at the age of 17 and moved to Paris that same year to study painting at the Académie Julian. He was described as a rebel, one who resisted authority, which became evident when he dropped out of art school after just six months.

It wasn’t until his visits to Algeria between 1945 and 1947 that he created Art Brut. Inspired by the constantly shifting, nomadic tribes of Algeria, Dubuffet decided to create an artistic movement that would lie outside the boundaries of the art world and would exist ‘without walls.’ This new Art Brut, or ‘raw art,’ placed emphasis on art created outside the established art scene, including pieces produced by untrained amateurs, children and psychiatric patients. Dubuffet would go on to emulate this expressive and untutored style in his own work.

According to Dubuffet, Art Brut was more precious than art created by professionals because “These works are created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere.” He argues, “We cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, fallacious parade.”

Major General JFC Fuller

The Portal Paintings by

Top Image: “The Portal of the First Order- Building of the Pyramid”, 1909

Bottom Image: “The Portal of the Second Order- Knowledge and Conversation”

Major-General John Frederick Charles Fuller was a British Army officer, military historian, and strategist, notable as an early theorist of modern armoured warfare, including categorizing principles of warfare. With 45 books and many articles,, he was a highly prolific author whose ideas reached army officers and the interested public. He explored the business of fighting, in terms of the relationship between warfare and social, political, and economic factors in the civilian sector.

Fuller had an occultist side that oddly mixed with his military side. He was an early disciple of English poet and magician Aleister Crowley, and was very familiar with his and other forms of magick and mysticism. During this period of his life, he wrote “The Treasure House of Images”, edited early sections of Crowley’s magical autobiography “The Temple of Solomon the King” and produced highly regarded paintings dealing with A∴A∴ teachings: these paintings have been used in recent years as the covers of the journal’s revival, “The Equinox, Volume IV”.

Willie White

Willie White, “Birds and Crosses”, Self-Taught Artist, Felt Tip Markers on Paper

A retired gent with a mesozoic vision, Willie White, a self taught artist from New Orleans, sold felt marker landscapes like “Birds and Crosses”, from his Central City front porch. He painted odd animals but the women he painted were odder, at times resembling those obscene “Sheela-na-gig” female gargoyles that can be seen exposing themselves above strategic portals on ancient Irish cathedrals.

Bernard Gilardi

Paintings by Bernard Gilardi, Self-Taught Magical Realist Artist

When Bernard Gilardi died in 2008 at the age of 88 he had made nearly four hundred oil paintings. The fruits of a more than forty-year effort, these works were tucked away in the basement studio of his Milwaukee home, neatly stacked amongst files of preliminary sketches and the magazine and newspaper cuttings from which he drew inspiration.

During his lifetime Gilardi hadn’t publicly exhibited any of his work. Ironically, it was Gilardi’s funeral that eventually brought his paintings out of the basement. A family friend attending the funeral at the Gilardi home saw his studio and told daughters Dee and Mary they should show their father’s work. This suggestion prompted the sisters to take photographs of a few paintings and send them to various galleries in the Milwaukee area.

Debra Brehmer, director of Milwaukee’s Portrait Society, was one of those who received the photographs. A contemporary art gallery, Portrait Society showcases both current and historic artists who work in portraiture. Brehmer called to inquire about the paintings immediately after looking at them. Soon she and artist Richard Knight, her assistant for the excursion, were descending into Gilardi’s basement studio and excitedly uncovering painting after painting. “We were down there with our mouths open,” says Brehmer. The two spent months in Gilardi’s basement studio, cataloging and photographing his paintings.

According to Brehmer, Gilardi is a rare example of a self-taught artist who, painting in his spare time, crafted not only a prolific amount of work—more than some professional artists—but work whose style and subject matter evolved over time. It’s even more incredible when one considers that he had no support group or critical audience from which he received feedback. His devout Catholic family mostly ignored his painting—to them it was simply “Bernard’s pastime”—or found the figures and faces he painted a bit too strange for contemplation.

Keerych Luminokaya

Keerych Luminokaya, Title Unknown, (Lizard), Computer Graphics

Keerych Luminokaya is a Russian-born visionary artist.

“Art-project Luminokaya lab. appeared as a result of a huge amount of data coming from the great field of energy and information in forms of light and energy waves, visions, images, dream-state objects, trans personal visions and visions beyond personality, and also symbols, signs and channeling. The vast amount of information offered by The Space didn’t allow to ignore this exciting and rich experience. My input was minimized to pressing the keyboard keys, and the awareness of infinity and abundance of the info-energy continuum can let me speak only about being a channel, or a medium. So, there can’t be any question of authorship.”

– Keerych Luminokaya

Esther Pearl Watson

Paintings by Esther Pearl Watson

Esther Pearl Watson grew up in various locales around north Texas. Throughout her childhood, her father built large flying saucers out of old auto parts and scraps. At times, this freaked the neighbors out. It was also evidently part of the reason the Watson family moved around so much. She weaves much from this unique upbringing into her complex and stunning paintings. Watson’s attention to light, detail and bustling life of each piece is to the point where I keep finding something new with each return. Plus, y’know, flying saucers. Sometimes I’m so happy to see her work, I about grind my teeth.

Alfred Wallis

Paintings by Alfred Wallis:

Top Image: “Ships with Flowering Trees”, 1938, Oil, Household Paint and Pencil on Paper, 24 x 33 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Image: “Saint Ives Harbour, Cornwall”, 1928-1942, Oil with Graphite on Card Mounted on Plywood Board, 38 x 44 cm, Royal Museum, Greenwich, London

Born in Devon in 1855, Alfred Wallis was a Cornish fisherman and mariner who took up painting in his old age. When he left school he joined the merchant navy, sailing schooners across the north Atlantic between Penzance and Newfoundland. After his marriage and the death of his two infant children, Wallis moved his family to Saint Ives, Cornwall, where he worked for twenty years as a marine scrap dealer, buying and selling iron, sails and rope for use on sailing boats.

After his wife died in 1922, Wallis started painting, finding his inspiration in his memories. Being very poor, he used whatever materials were at hand for his artwork. His 1928 painting “Two Masted Ship”, now in the Tate Colletion, was painted on the back of an inexpensive Great Western Railway fare schedule.

In 1928, Alfred Wallis was discovered by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, both established artists, when they came to Saint Ives to found an artist’s colony. Wallis was propelled into a circle of some of the most progressive artists working in Britain in the 1930s. Not influenced by others, Wallis continued to paint with the same manner, immediacy, and directness as before.

In 1942, Alfred Wallis died penniless in the Penzance Union Workhouse, a public assistance institution near Madron, Cornwall. A man who influenced a generation of painters, Alfred Wallis is buried in the Barnoon graveyard at Saint Ives, Cornwall, which overlooks the Tate Saint Ives Museum holding many of his paintings,now considered fine examples of art brut.