Sawada Shinichi

Figurative Sculptures by Sawada Shinichi

Shinichi Sawada was born in Shiga Prefecture, Japan. Diagnosed as autistic, he found employment in the hospital bakery of the Ritto Nakayoshi Sagyojo (institute for the mentally disabled, in the city of Kusatsu). In 2001, the professor directing the workshop where Sawada worked with clay, launched the construction of a small potter’s cabin: it was located a few kilometers from the institution and deep in the wilds.

Here Sawada creates his sculptures silently and with unflagging regularity. His works – demons, monsters, masks – are characterized by hundreds spikes of clay that give them an intricate and frightful beauty. He plants these one by one into the either round or cylindrical shapes constituting the central body of each piece. After shaping the bodies, he fires them in a large wood-fired kiln built of earth and ignited only twice a year. This gives them their brownish-red hue in lighter or darker shades, depending on the flames.

These monstrous and magical creatures seem to be the fruit of a personal mythology, maybe inspired by the old Japanese traditions of imaginary beasts, ghosts and spirits. We can find affinities with the masks of Nō Theatre, manga characters, and African tribal arts.

Charles Dellschau

The Sketchbook of Charles Dellschau

Charles Dellschau was an American butcher who lived between 1830 and 1923. He was a part of the Sonora Aero Club, a group of men that met to discuss and design flying machines. According to his diaries one of the members of this seceret society had discovered the formula for an anti-gravity fuel he called “NB Gas.” The aim of the group was to design flying machines that would use this anti-gravity fuel.

Dellschau was a draftsman for the club, designing a variety of fantastic flying machines for the group. After his death, all of his art works were discarded, but used furniture dealer rescued the notebooks and drawings and took them to his warehouse, where they sat forgotten for several years under a pile of discarded carpet. A university student asked the furniture dealer if she could use some of Dellschau’s notebooks as part of a display on the history of flight.

The drawings were a hit, inspiring the imagination and creating a sense of wonder in onlookers. Years after his death, Dellschau’s art works received the recognition they so deserved. Now his antique illustrations are celebrated for their inventiveness, artistic appeal and for simply being marvellous.

Terry Turrell

Terry Turrell, “When the Morning Comes”, 2009, Oil on Panel, 60.1 x 81.3 cm, Private Collection

Turrell was born in 1946 in rural Idaho, and traveled to San Francisco and then Seattle to find his niche in the art world, first whittling, then writing songs, and creating T-Shirts with unique designs. He put together quirky assemblages from a scrap yard of collected wood, tin and metal in his garage and backyard.

Much of his painting was done with his fingers, brushes, and tools from his tool box. His art was discovered in Seattle and he continues to produce improvisational artwork, which has acquired a loyal following. His works appear in prominent collections throughout the world.

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

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.

Jane Parker

Jane Parker, “Drifting”, Gouache, Beads, Sequins, 2014

Jane Parker paints in Noosa, a beach town in Australia. Her colourful paintings resemble Aborigional artworks, painted in gouache but embellished with beads, sequins and gold.

“I find that I will dream of a finished picture and then sit down to execute it without preliminary drawings,” said Jane. “This picture was triggered by something I read, about the jellyfish drifting in the ocean at the mercy of storms and all obstacles. It seemed to me that the human condition is very like this.”

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.