Raw Vision 108 by Raw Vision

RAWVISION108 AUTUMN/FALL 2021

EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Frank Maresca, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels ASSISTANT EDITOR Mariella Landolfi FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Natasha Jaeger ADVERTISING MANAGER Susan Hirschhaut PRODUCTION EDITOR Aoife Dunphy ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P Borum, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernández, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell, Daniel Wojcik PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd Letchmore Heath WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com

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RAW NEWS Fashion, humour, acquisitions and more from the art brut world

BRUCE BICKFORD Clay models and animations that reveal a wild imagination

WESLEY WILLIS A whirlwind maker of detailed cityscapes and irreverent music

´ VOJISLAV JAKIC Drawings with echoes of death, and shelves of odd trinkets

SALVATION MOUNTAIN Love and toil have preserved this Californian beacon of hope

DRAWINGS FROM CHILDHOOD A Lisbon doctor’s study of childrens’ art as a diagnostic tool

ROBERT E SMITH An artist and his uplifting work embraced by an Ozark town

REGINALD ENGLISH Metalwork embodying the life, soul and traditions of Jamaica

RAW CLASSICS A close-up look at Ionel Talpazan’s UFOs–Dedicat for Peace

REVIEWS Exhibitions and publications

GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE Details of notable international venues

ISSN 0955-1182

COVER IMAGE: Bruce Bickford, Garden of Nymphs, photo: Alex Maness

Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) September 2021 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, and distributed in the USA by ePost Global, 18 Central Boulevard, South Hackensack NJ 07606. Periodicals postage paid at South Hackensack NJ. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Raw Vision c/o 18 Central Blvd, South Hackensack NJ 07076

Raw Vision cannot be held responsible for the return of unsolicited material. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Raw Vision.

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BEST DESIGN MEDIA AWARD

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UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD

R AW N E W S WALKER ROCK GARDEN DEMOLITION It took Milton Walker and his wife, Florence, two decades to create a lavish fantasia of stone, glass and cement behind their little bungalow on a Seattle hillside looking toward Puget Sound. It took two generations and nearly three more decades for their heirs to lose their resolve to preserve their grandfather’s masterwork. It took a large excavator just a few hours in early June this year to reduce the best of the Walker Rock Garden’s dazzling arches, walls, stairways and plazas to rubble. Walker started “rocking up” the yard outside his family’s little bungalow when, in about 1959, he was idled by a strike at the Boeing Company, where he worked stringing cables into airplane wings, and he carried on until Alzheimer’s disease stopped him. He and Florence scoured America’s Pacific Northwest for agates, geodes, petrified wood

and round river rocks to realise his vision; she complemented his work with a living garden of brilliant flowers and downy moss. The Walker Rock Garden was actually a suite of celebratory spaces and monuments. These included a sprawling re-creation of the Cascade Mountains, a jetting fountain ringed by mosaic greetings, an agatefloored plaza popular for weddings, a gleaming wall of giant mosaic butterflies (a favourite motif ), and Walker’s masterpiece, a multi-arched “Bicentennial Tower”, nearly six meters tall, erected in 1976 to celebrate the nation’s anniversary. Inhabitants of the West Seattle neighbourhood, and others who attended the Walkers’ open houses, cherished a visionary landscape surpassed on the West Coast only by Los Angeles’s Watts Towers. But, tucked away on a side street, it was unknown to most Seattleites and overlooked by the local art and preservation establishments. In 2011, the Walkers’ heirs agreed to sell to a developer who promised to preserve the rock garden, then had to pay to unwind the deal after they learned he was notorious for stealthily acquiring and razing heritage properties. In 2014, I tried to buy the garden and donate it for a public park, but the heirs were now wary. Ownership eventually passed to a granddaughter, who proposed to live on the property and preserve the rock garden. However, last autumn she agreed to sell one of the two platted lots – including the tower, agate patio, and a monumental stone stairway – to a builder financed by the same developer. In early June, the excavators rolled in, to the surprise of even the neighbours. But Walker built well, and though toppled, the tower refused to collapse. Neighbour John Osborne managed to get its core section and the remnants of several arches moved across the street, where he hopes to restore and re-erect it. Deb Barker, a West Seattle preservation activist and retired city planner, is seeking transport and a public site for whatever can be salvaged before what is left of the garden – including the beloved “Butterfly Wall” – gets levelled. “We’ve got to look forward,” she says. “We can’t let a treasure like this become just an asterisk.” ERIC SCIGLIANO left: The Butterfly Wall, photo: Ted Degener below: The Bicentennial Tower before it was toppled, photo: Ted Degener inset: The tower among the wreckage, photo: Eric Scigliano

R AW N E W S Jun 19 – spring 2023 Marking the sixtieth anniversary of Madge Gill’s death, this free outdoor exhibition sees 20 large-scale reproductions of the artist’s mesmerising drawings and watercolours installed along the three-mile route of The Line, London’s first dedicated public art walk. Nature in Mind runs from Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to the Royal Docks in Newham, the East End borough where Gill lived and produced the majority of her work from 1920 to 1961. The digitally reproduced works have been selected from Newham Council’s archive of Gill’s work – which is the world’s largest – and have been chosen to demonstrate the range and brilliance of this important

outsider artist, focussing on the influence of nature in her practice. Megan Piper, Director of The Line, says: “This exhibition feels particularly timely as we emerge from lockdown with a renewed appreciation of the outdoors and nature and a heightened awareness of the positive impact it has on our health and wellbeing.” The display includes two monumental presentations: a 60-metre long, botanically-inspired drawing spanning both sides of a bridge along the route and Red Women, a nine-metre long work that has never been exhibited in its entirety due to its scale. Presented in partnership with Newham Council, Nature in Mind will be accompanied by a programme of activities, school workshops and a seminar on art and mental health in the autumn. www.the-line.org

ÉCRITS D’ART BRUT – EXTRAVAGANCES LANGAGIÈRES Oct 20 – Jan 23, 2022 Declarations of love, angry letters, erotic messages, journal-like notes or utopian stories: these texts by art brut creators were written behind closed doors, in silence and in secret. Composed in painstaking calligraphy or hastily scribbled, sometimes embroidered, carved into stone or supplemented with images, they bear witness to an astonishing wealth of ideas. This exhibition – “Écrits d’Art Brut – Extravagances Langagières” – presents works by 13 artists whose visual impact is enhanced by their playful approach to grammar and spelling. Word and image are bound together. The works presented come from numerous museums and private collections in European countries as well as Brazil and the USA. Favourites such as Adolf Wölfli, Carlo Zinelli and Laure Pigeon feature, as well as new discoveries like Pascal Vonlanthen and Marie Lieb. TINGUELY MUSEUM, Paul Sacher-Anlage 2, 4002, Basel, SWITZERLAND www.tinguely.ch

QEO Park, photo: Angus Mill

Heinrich Anton Müller

MADGE GILL: NATURE IN MIND

GATECRASHERS AT THE HIGH until Dec 11, 2021 The name of this exhibition refers to how – after World War I – artists without any formal training began to have their work shown at major museums, thereby “crashing” the gates of the traditional, elite art world. “Gatecrashers: the Rise of the Self-taught Artist in America” showcases three celebrated, interwar outsiders artists – John Kane, Horace Pippin, and Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses – and also features works by some of their self-taught contemporaries, such as Morris Hirschfield. Celebrated by collectors and museums such as MOMA in the 1930s and early 1940s, these were creators who redefined who could be an artist in the USA and paved the way for outsider artists today. HIGH MUSEUM OF ART 1280 Peachtree St, NE, Atlanta, GA 30309, USA www.high.org

Horace Pippin

Julia Göransson

Mattias Johansson

ATELJÉ INUTI Sept 11 – Oct 31, 2021 In “The Force, Mattias Johansson and Julia Göransson”, Ateljé Inuti presents the work of two artists in a huge, old enamel factory. Göransson’s drawings, paintings and sculptures are in a variety of materials, while Johansson’s dense, organic, abstract images are in charcoal and chalk on large sheets of paper. RONNEBY KULTURCENTRUM Kallingevägen 3, 372 39 Ronneby, SWEDEN www.inuti.se Stéphane Blanquet

TRANCHÉE RACINE: BLANQUET IN PARIS until Jan 2, 2022 Originally a magazine of images bringing together an international group of creators, “Tranchée Racine“ is an exhibition presented by multi-media artist Stéphane Blanquet, to accompany the monograph ”Dans les Têtes de Stéphane Blanquet“. Featuring the work of artists with a rebellious, libertarian spirit, “Tranchée Racine” is intended to question our relationship to sexuality, death, nature, animals, plants, politics, imagery and more. HALLE SAINT PIERRE 2 Rue Ronsard 75018 Paris, FRANCE www.hallesaintpierre.org

Stéphane Blanquet

Morris Hirshfield

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THE ASTOUNDING WORLDS OF BRUCE BICKFORD Surreal animations, nostalgic models of 1950s America, exquisitely drawn landscapes: this artist put his cynicism, fear and astounding imagination into everything he created BRETT INGRAM

y the time the American artist Bruce Bickford passed away in 2019, he had created more than a million modelling-clay sculptures, thousands of illustrations, 70,000 frames of line animation, and several unfinished graphic novels. However, he was best known for his startlingly original clay animation, and his filmic collaborations with musician Frank Zappa in the 1970s. Bickford brought the same obsessive, precise, labourintensive artistry to his illustrations and sculptures that he poured into his surrealistic, hallucinatory, action-packed –

Bickford animating a clay garden scene, 2007, photo: Brett Ingram

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and often violent – stop-motion animation and twodimensional illustrative animation. The prevalence of vicious imagery in his work stemmed not from innate hostility but from a fearful imagination. Bickford himself was mild-mannered, of very slight build, almost elfin in appearance, with delicate hands, soft features and a quiet voice. He was no stranger to being bullied. His work reflects a diversity of genres and subject matter, but a consistent theme in much of his work is the heroic underdog – "the little guys," as he referred to

above: Big mouth babies, 1990s, modelling clay, 3 x 4 in. / 7.5 x 10 cm, photo: Alex Maness below: Medium-size heads,1970s, modelling clay, from 0.5 x 1 in. to 1 x 2 in. (1.5 x 2.5 cm to 2.5 x 5 cm), photo: Brett Ingram

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Big mouth werewolf babies, 1990s, modelling clay, 3 x 4 in. / 7.5 x 10 cm, photo: Alex Maness

them. Another motif is a nostalgia for 1950s Americana, a reminder of his early childhood when the world seemed simpler and purer, before innocence was lost and he realised it had been an illusion. His wariness of the government, and his contempt (to put it mildly) for large corporations, land barons and industrial magnates – responsible for the destruction of the environment and natural resources – runs through much of his work: the action movies, the mysteries and detective stories, the science fiction and paranormal narratives, the legends of mythical creatures, and the tales of government conspiracies or corporate corruption. Bickford was born in Seattle, Washington, on February 11, 1947, the third of four sons, to George and Audrey Bickford. George was a structural engineer for The Boeing Company and worked on projects including surface-toair missiles, and military and commercial aircraft. Audrey was a homemaker and unpublished writer of fiction and poetry. She instilled in her son an appreciation of books, art and nature (he remained an avid climber of trees, even well into his sixties, scaling firs and spruces up to 70 feet

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or more). He showed artistic promise as early as the age of three, drawing with pencil and crayon, and modelling with clay. His parents encouraged his creativity, and his mother meticulously preserved his childhood drawings. At 15, he began making stop-motion 8 mm films using model cars and clay figures. George Bickford designed and built the family home on Military Road in the city of SeaTac (named after the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport), just south of Seattle. Sited high on top of the Highline ridge, through which the Green River flows, the home overlooked Kent Valley farmlands – perhaps an influence in Bickford’s proclivity for using the bird’s eye view in much of his artwork. From his father, young Bickford inherited spatial visualisation, critical thinking, attention to detail, and an eidetic memory (of images, sounds, conversations). He also inherited his father’s pareidolia – the tendency to see recognisable objects or patterns in otherwise random or unrelated objects (for example, faces in clouds, trees, planets, pancakes). Pareidolia was a distinct factor in the development of Bickford’s signature animation style of

Big mouth babies / werewolf babies replacement animation series, 1990s, modelling clay, from 0.25 x 0.25 in. to 4 x 5 in. (0.5 x 0.5 cm to 10 x 12.5 cm, photo: Alex Maness

constantly morphing faces and objects, and it is also evident in his illustrations in which faces or bodies often seem to emerge from or blend into clouds or landscapes. In 1966, Bickford joined the US Marines and, during the three years he served, spent eleven months in Vietnam at the height of the war. Honourably discharged in 1969, he returned home to Seattle and resumed drawing, sculpting, and shooting clay animation, gradually developing his unique aesthetic. By the end of 1971, he had loaded a van with hundreds of clay sculptures and a few film prints and headed south to look for work. Eventually, in Los Angeles, he was introduced to musician Frank Zappa. Impressed with Bickford’s work, Zappa hired the artist to create animated sequences for a concert film he was producing. When Baby Snakes premiered in 1979, it received mostly poor reviews, but Bickford’s animation sequences won awards at a French animated film competition. When their collaboration ended in 1980, Zappa claimed ownership of all Bickford’s animations. The musician went on to incorporate a few sequences

into his 1982 concert film, The Dub Room Special, and released the rest of it as The Amazing Mr. Bickford (1987), a compilation of Bickford animations set to Zappa’s orchestral music. Bickford returned to Seattle, moving back into the family home with his mother (his parents were by then divorced), and he began to work independently again. He completed two major clay animated films, Prometheus’ Garden (1988, 28 minutes) and CAS’L’ (2015, 48 minutes), and several pencil-drawn “line-animated” films. All the while, in parallel with his work as an animator, Bickford was prolific in illustration and clay sculpture work. The garage his father had designed to house up to four cars, with room to spare, became the repository for most of Bickford’s artistic output. His clay sculptures took up most of the space. Dimly lit by overhanging bare bulbs, stacked floor-to-ceiling in homemade cabinets made of cardboard with cellophane windows, his clay creations were roughly organised into categories, each cabinet labelled in black marker:“Faces”, “Heads”, “Torsos”, “Monsters”, “Animals”, “Taverns”, “Roadhouses”,

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WESLEY WILLIS Whether making cult music or ballpoint pen cityscapes, this prolific Chicago artist was a creative force who broke rules and left his mark ARON PACKER

Portrait of the artist, c. 1992, photo: Carla Winterbottom all artworks shown: ballpoint pen and marker on board, approx. 41 x 28 in. / 104 x 71 cm, unless otherwise stated

esley Willis (1963–2003) was a firm fixture in Chicago’s outsider art and underground music scenes. Initially beloved by just the alternative, bohemian set, of late his work has become more widely appreciated by art and music fans alike. In particular, demand for his ballpoint drawings of Chicago has increased dramatically in recent years. Born in 1963 in Chicago, Willis had an unsettled early life. His parents had a troubled relationship and were separated, and he and his siblings spent time in

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several foster homes. Willis found some stability in one particular home in Phoenix, Illinois, where he was raised by an “aunt” who was loving and supportive. In his twenties – following an incident with his mother’s boyfriend who robbed and threatened him – Willis was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He began to hear voices in his head and had other maladies and tics, many of which contributed to the art and the music he went on to create in his too-short life. He had a savantlike memory and could recall all the buildings of his

“He embodied the strangest, most wonderful combination of charm and chaos.”

The Chicago River at Night, 1987 images courtesy: Toomey & Co Auctioneers, Oak Park, IL, unless otherwise stated

downtown Chicago neighbourhood – their history and other information – and draw them from any angle, with everything oriented correctly. He spent his days at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). It was easy for him to get there as it was just a few blocks away from where he lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, the public housing project in the Bronzeville neighbourhood on the South Side of Chicago. At 8.30 each morning, he would wait for art historian Rolf Achilles, or George Danforth, the former

Dean of Architecture at IIT. They would get him a coffee and set him up in an office where he could draw, and later on use the Yamaha keyboard that they bought to keep him further engaged. At first, as Willis was working out his drawing style, he used postcards that Achilles gave to him – aerial and panoramic photos of Chicago – as a reference. An architect at the institute helped him with perspective, while Associate Dean, Peter Beltemacchi, taught him how to create stylised wheels on his vehicles. After a while,

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SHADOWS OF DEATH The mysterious scrolls and trinket shelves of Serbian artist Vojislav Jakić came from a place of loss and grief NINA KRSTIC ´

above: Untitled, 2002, combined technique on cardboard, 27.5 x x 19.5 in. / 70 x 50 cm

opposite: The Scary, Horned Insects, c. 1970, pen and coloured pencil on paper, 39.5 x 55.5 in. / 100.5 x 141.5 cm, Collection de l’Art Brut

all images courtesy: Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art (Jagodina, Serbia), unless otherwise stated

ojislav Jakić suffered a childhood of poverty and loss. He was born in 1932 in Veliki Radobilj, a village near Bitolj in North Macedonia, and three years later moved with his family to the small town of Despotovac, in central Serbia. The son of an orthodox priest, he had a devoutly religious, strict upbringing. By the time he was eight or so, his brother and sister had died, one of diphtheria, the other of scarlet fever, both illnesses that were incurable at the time. The death of his father followed, and young Jakić and his mother were left to cope alone. Jakić created his first significant drawing, Portrait of the Mother, when he was eight years old. Gradually, he

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developed his artistic skills, and, as a teenager, he was able to earn a little money by doing portraits of deceased loved ones for grieving families. The work meant that Jakić was confronted with death and its effects repeatedly, but this was not new to him – from early childhood, he had watched his father, in his black robes, performing funeral services as the dead were carried into the church. In 1952, at the age of 20, Jakić went to Belgrade, where he would stay for five years, visiting artists’ studios, drawing and sculpting, and trying to establish a career for himself. He found, however, that every door was closed to him. An unknown, untrained, provincial

above: Untitled, 1987, Indian ink on paper, 24.5 x x 19.5 in. / 62 x 50 cm

opposite, top: Multi-titled Painting, 1975, Indian ink on paper, 38.5 x 27 in. / 98 x 69 cm opposite, bottom: Dream, 1997, combined technique, 19.5 x 14 in. / 50 x 35 cm

“This is neither drawing nor painting; it is a deposit of sorrow.” artist with no money behind him, he – along with other avant-garde artists – was thwarted by the conventions and taboos of the time. The art establishment favoured the sleepy artistry of the elite salon artists with their academic background; there was no room for those with no formal art education or who practised innovative forms of creativity that demanded a new kind of appreciation. The conventional art world was baffled by Jakić’s work. Dubbed “the strange black man”, owing to his perpetual dark attire, he embodied the notion of rejection, betrayal and hostility. All the while, however, Jakić continued creating his drawings of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms on huge paper scrolls which he rolled up like carpets. At this time, Jakić was also making his “shelves”. He collected old, discarded objects – burnt and rotten

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timber, human and animal skulls, owls’ wings, foxes’ tails – which he arranged on handmade shelves, like a magician’s inventory. It was a strange, disparate collection of items in which only the artist could see a harmony. He would take the shelves to Belgrade in old boxes, and exhibit them with the objects, as well as with sawdust gathered from beneath carpenters’ stalls – a symbol of physical and intellectual poverty. Through his work, Jakić gave shape to his feelings about the shadows of death which had followed him through his life. By arranging the shelves, he was expressing his pain; he stored rejected objects like rejected human souls which were “dying slowly“. These memento mori shelves – which had titles such as Petrified Owls, Things that do not Die, Deserted Steeple – also harkened back to his childhood when he would peep into his father’s

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LOVE FOR LOVE How Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain was saved from decay by a floor fitter from Detroit TYLL FARNSCHLÄDER

Ron Malinowski at Salvation Mountain, in January 2020, giving Leonard Knight’s signature “double thumbs-up” all photos by Tyll Farnschläder, unless otherwise stated

ravelling towards the town of Niland on State Route 111 in southern California, Salvation Mountain can already be seen from a distance. Out here in the desert, Leonard Knight’s colourful monument, his work of a lifetime, finds itself in a colourless setting. Despite being in the wealthy state of California, with Palm Springs and its golf resorts nearby, Imperial Valley is one of the poorest places in the US, lacking not only colour but hope too, it can seem. But, six years after Knight’s death, his unique work stands as a beacon of positivity for the region, still speaking the simple message of its architect: God is Love. It

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continues to attract visitors from all over the world too. This was not expected when, in 2011, Knight went into a retirement home. Rather, people worried about the future of Salvation Mountain. Could this artificial hill made from clay, straw and latex paint be preserved? For three decades, Knight had worked on it almost daily. Without constant upkeep, it would collapse back into the sand from which it was formed. And so a group of supporters set up a non-profit organisation to keep Knight’s work and message alive. The residents of Slab City, known as “Slabbers”, played a key role in saving the mountain. It marks the

Knight began building the “museum” – a hollow dome – in 2000, but it remains unfinished

entrance to their settlement of trailers, campers and tents. Over the years, Slab City has been mythologised into “The Last Free Place“ in the USA. The most diverse of travellers are drawn here, from pensioners in luxury campers to hitchhiking hippies, all looking for a sense of freedom that they feel does not exist anywhere else. Knight himself was a seeker when he arrived in Slab City in 1984. Originally from Vermont, he had been travelling the US for four years, making a hot air balloon as he went. With a big heart on its side, it was meant to spread the message of Christ’s love from the sky – but, in Slab City, his last attempt at flying his creation failed.

He decided, as a kind of compensation, to make a small monument to God before moving on. The new project, however, enthused him even more than the last. In fact, he had found his life’s work. Over the next 30 years, he and his mountain became an integral part of Slab City. It was not all plain sailing, however. Knight made his mountain by plastering over piled-up junk and rubble with concrete – but he had used too much sand in the mix and, in 1989, the mountain collapsed. He took it as a sign from God and started again, this time using adobe. Like Knight, most people who come to live in Slab City are “outsiders“ in some way. People who cannot,

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THE ART OF CHILDHOOD IS NOT THE CHILDHOOD OF ART An historic collection of drawings by Portuguese children with learning disabilities JOÃO PEDRO FRÓIS

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opposite: Blood (thematic category: accidents, deaths and cruelties), 1944, crayon on paper, 6 x 8.5 in. / 15.5 x 22 cm

above: Untitled (thematic category: accidents, deaths and cruelties), n.d., crayon on paper, 8 x 6 in. / 20 x 15.5 cm

ntil the eighteenth century, drawings by children were disparaged by adults and often considered to be chaotic, irrational, or even evil. Then, from the eighteenth century onwards, childhood began to be seen in a positive way that was associated with innocence and freedom. This new perception of children gave way to a view that they have pure, original and good-natured souls. The first studies on children’s art appeared in the mid nineteenth century. Since then, the characteristics of the subjects, forms and content in art by children have attracted the attention of psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, art historians and artists, and studies of children’s drawings can be seen in two ways. First, from a psychological angle, like that

of neuroscientists and psychologists, which focusses on describing the idiosyncrasies of the cognitive, emotional and behavioural development of the children themselves. It frames them within categories of illness, and studies the artworks to support the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of the child. Second, there is an aesthetic perspective, which is often adopted by specialists working in the art world. Artists, art historians and critics look at the aesthetic and artistic qualities of the work produced, and study it with reference to the artistic production, and the artist’s originality within a general artistic context such as art brut and outsider art. Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), who was both a psychiatrist and an art historian, aligned more with the second point of view. He did not think

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ROBERT E SMITH When he moved to new city, this artist found a true home for himself and for his vivid paintings with their life-affirming stories DAVE HOEKSTRA

Robert E Smith, aged 82, 2009, courtesy: Sesha Smith

here is a humid malaise in downtown Springfield, Missouri’s third-largest city (pop. 168,000). Like a diamond in the palm of a giving hand, Springfield – “The Queen City of the Ozarks” – is nestled in rolling hills and cool lakes about 200 miles west of St Louis. It is May 2020 and the USA is reeling from the effects of COVID-19. Few downtown Springfield stores have reopened and there is just a handful of people on the street. One young couple claims to have lost their home. With dirt on their faces and a glaze in their eyes,

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they stand at the corner of Campbell and Walnut Street asking passers-by for money, oblivious to the playful mural on the building wall behind them. The gateway to an eternally innocent world exists in the giant painting. It depicts the work of Robert Eugene (“E”) Smith (1927–2010), arguably the most famous artist to emerge from the city. Smith painted footloose, always-smiling characters with vivid colours and a childlike spirit. He made liberal use of carefree cats and dogs, and his skies are always bright blue. The

“Each of his pieces is a whole world he created”

Christmas Reef, 2004, acrylic paint and clear lacquer on plywood, 33.5 x 50.5 in. / 85 x 128 cm all images courtesy: Collection of the Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO. Image © Springfield Art Museum, unless otherwise stated

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St Nick's Trip to the South Pole, 1984, acrylic and ink on canvas, 23.5 x 19.5 in. / 59.5 x 49.5 cm

mural illustrates the artist’s memories of downtown Springfield in 1976. Based on his original painting, it was commissioned through the Springfield Program for Public Art, and – funded by donations from Smith supporters – painted in 2000 by local artists. Born in St Louis, Smith was an only child. “When he was seven years old, he had malaria and suffered hearing loss from that,” says his legal guardian and cousin, Grace Matthews. Smith’s birth father, Clarence, died in 1935. His mother, Mary Agnes, remarried and, in 1940, Smith began living with her and his stepfather who was alcoholic and abusive. When he turned 21, Smith enlisted in the US Army but received a medical discharge after just six months. A year later, in 1949, he was diagnosed with a bacterial infection in the heart and was subsequently institutionalised at the Missouri State School for Feeble-Minded and Epileptic (now the Southeast Missouri Mental Health Center) in Farmington, Missouri. According to Matthews, he suffered an emotional breakdown in 1956. In their 2011 anthology Robert E. Smith : Paintings,

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Drawings, Poems, and Stories, artists Eric Pervukhin and Carla Stine wrote of Smith’s late teen years in the Farmington mental institution: “At the time, our culture not only stigmatised mental illness, but treated it as a moral failing. Robert underwent numerous shock treatments, many the consequence of his fumbled attempts to escape. Loving life, he longed to experience the larger world.” Smith was a huge fan of the St Louis Cardinals baseball team and, during the 1960s when he was back living in St Louis, he worked selling merchandise at the city’s old Busch Stadium. He also sold Grit, a popular rural newspaper, and spent most of 1969 working at the Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Center. He had dropped out of high school but went on to receive his high school diploma in 1970 when he was 43 years old. Throughout these years, Smith was making art. He was self-taught and did not sell his first work until 1973 when he sent two drawings to an auction in New York City. He received $75 for the pair. When he went to Springfield in 1975, the artist

Sam's Boat, 1995, watercolour, acrylic and ink on paper, 17.5 x 13.5 in. / 44.5 x 34 cm

found his true home. “Once he got to Springfield that community embraced him,” Matthews says. “He liked it there. And he stayed there.” Longtime Springfield musician-producer Nick Sibley (Ozark Mountain Daredevils, the Skeletons) was one of the first people in town to connect with Smith. “In 1975, I was a senior in college and bought my first house near the college (Missouri State),” Sibley recalls, sitting in his recording studio, located across the street from the Smith mural. “I just got married. Robert was walking by and said, ‘Sir, may I use your restroom?’ I said ‘sure.’ And from then on, early in the morning, late at night, whatever, we’d hear the front door open and he’d say, ‘It’s me, Robert E Smith! I need to use the restroom.’ He wouldn’t knock on the door or anything.” In 1976, Smith painted a portrait of Sibley and his then-wife. “One of his earliest paintings,” Sibley says, with a smile. “It’s us standing there. There was a gas station way in the background. But in the painting the gas pumps were right there with us. There was

no perspective. We were at the gas station.” Smith also liked to perform – sing, dance and act – and his “story paintings” feature a hand-written description of the painting as well as a cassette of himself reading the story. In 1998, he released a selfmade cassette called Moon over Queen City with covers of Blue Velvet, Skip to My Lou and God Bless America. The previous year, he did the album cover for Nothing to Lose, for Sibley’s band The Skeletons, who were at the time one of the great regional pop-rock bands. Every so often, Smith also taught art classes, having earned a substitute teaching certificate at Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State) in 1981. He was known for riding around Springfield on his customised Stingray bicycle with its comfy banana seat and large handlebars. “It kept him healthy for a long time,” Matthews says. Reportedly, the artist once cycled 44 miles south out of Springfield to the country music tourist destination of Branson, Missouri. He never drove a car, and Matthews says he was afraid of flying. He

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SPIRIT OF JAMAICA The bright metal cut-out artworks of Reginald English evoke the life, tradition and mythology of the artist’s home island CHRISTINE KRISTEN

this page: Pearlie, 1994, 18 x 28 in. / 46 x 71 cm opposite: Mr Hubie Will Grab You, 1995, 15 x 25 in. / 38 x 63.5 cm, photo: Cavin-Morris Gallery

all works: coloured enamel paint on metal; images courtesy: Wayne and Myrene Cox Collection; photos: Wayne Cox, unless otherwise stated

“V

ery technical work; it come in like artist’s work.” So Reginald English described his vocation as a maker of painted metal cut-outs. Born in Highgate, Saint Mary, Jamaica, in either 1929 or 1937 (he said both dates at different

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times), he later moved to Boscobel, also in Saint Mary, to a house on the main north coast highway. He was trained as a tinsmith and earned money making household items, such as dog chains, washpan buckets, funnels and scoops. He also worked as a security guard, and played

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English’s artwork displayed outside his roadside shop, photos from top, first, third, fourth: C Kristen

the banjo and rhumba box – a plucked box musical instrument of the Caribbean – in a hotel band. In 1972, English was taught to draw by a visitor to the island, who then suggested that he combine his fanciful drawings with his metalwork. English drew “all different ting inna Jamaica shape – man a-ride horse, man a-ride donkey, man a-lead cow, all different ting”. He started transferring the drawings to metal sheets from the local hardware store, and then cut out the drawings with a machete – squared off and used like a chisel – and coloured them with enamel paint. After a while, he set up a roadside shop in the yard of his Boscobel home. With his bright creations hanging from the house and from a display unit made from old tree branches and bits of wood, passers-by could easily spot his business. Almost all of English’s works are vividly coloured, and figurative with dynamic, gestural shapes. Some are single figures: a lobster, snake, rabbit, bird or other animal, or a dreadlocked Rastafarian in overalls. Others show two figures in a genre scene: Marcus, a fisherman with his fish; a kissing couple; a “higgler” (market woman) carrying a basket of ackee fruit on her head; “Sam” a black man tossing a white tourist “Janet” into the sea. English also used religious and mythological sources, creating images of Moses with his rod and serpent, monsters, and mermaids (called “rivah mumma” or “nyah maid” in Jamaican patois), and male spirit figures with exposed penises. English identified these last as “whoodies” (the colloquial name for penis is “wood” or “whood”) – supernatural entities thought to live in the countryside – and he depicted them wearing neck chains and trousers with beaded trimmings, the garb of Jankunu performers. Jankunu (or Jonkunnu) is commonly practised in Jamaica and is described by anthropologist Kenneth Bilby (1) as silent mumming and dancing by all-male troupes of specific characters, such as “Pitchy-Patchy” and “Cow Head”, who perform on the streets at Christmas. English himself was a Cow Head performer with his local troupe. The dancers, waving mock pitchforks and machetes, rush at the watching crowd, scaring children and inciting people to pay them to take their “threats” further down the road. Jankunu has been practised in Jamaica since the latter half of the eighteenth century at least. Nowadays, these performances are mostly secular but originally Jankunu was an African-associated religious expression seeking the invocation of local ancestors to join in community festivities. English identified some of his Jankunu metal figures as “fear him at Christmas” or “he holds your hand; he tells you things.” His use of mermaids in his art also harkens back to

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below, left: River Mother and her Children, 1995, 21 x 35 in. / 53 x 89 cm below, right: Jankunu Man with Bird, 1996, 11.5 x 26.5 in. / 29 x 67 cm

local culture. In rural Jamaica, the aquatic creatures are widely believed to exist – particularly in a parish such as Saint Mary where several rivers empty into the sea – and their images can often be seen in woodcarvings. “Rivah Mumma” is depicted in Jamaican folklore as an enticing yet sinister figure, keen to lure unsuspecting victims into dangerous waters. English said that he often saw rivah mummas by the water: “I see dem but dem duck off quick. In all different shapes, anywhere you see water, like big rivah. Dem don’t show up by demselves. Dem siddung and comb im hair.” He said that their combs were highly coveted. “I would get dat comb and when I get dat comb, im have fe bring something to me fe get dat back.” English’s reported encounters with rivah mummas can be explained by the remarks of the late Barry Chevannes, a professor at the University of West Indies:

“Jamaica’s intuitives draw inspiration from their native religions. In the cosmology of the Jamaican people, their worldview, there is no great distinction between this world and the next world. You can easily pass from one dimension to another.”(2) The first exhibition of English’s work did not take place until 1997, the year of his death. Entitled “Redemption Songs/the Self-taught Artists of Jamaica”, it was put on at the Diggs Gallery at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, and later at venues in other locations including New York City and Washington DC. Curator of the exhibition, Randall Morris, wrote: “What pushes English’s work beyond craft is this serious undertone coupled with his sophisticated colour sense and the elaborate way he paints his work, often with patterns that break up the surface and add to their

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IONEL TALPAZAN UFOs–Dedicat for Peace DANIEL WOJCIK explains how this 1999 piece is emblematic of Talpazan’s work

he self-taught visionary artist Ionel Talpazan (1955–2015) is recognised internationally for his fascination with the mysteries of the cosmos and his depictions of spaceships and otherworldly technology. Talpazan’s all-consuming obsession with extraterrestrial engineering and alien life was triggered by a transformative experience he had as a child in rural Romania. When he was eight years old, he escaped a beating by his abusive foster mother by running away and sleeping in a ditch in a field. He maintained that, at some point during the night, he was engulfed by a swirling “blue light of energy” that he later came to believe was from a flying saucer. Talpazan said that his life’s purpose, his visions and his art were determined by that encounter, and that he was compelled to “sacrifice his life to the UFO”. In 1987, Talpazan escaped from Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania, swimming the Danube River to Yugoslavia where he was imprisoned and then sent to a refugee camp. He was later granted asylum in New York City, where he struggled to survive as a street artist, at times finding himself homeless. Despite adversity, Talpazan

gradually made a name for himself, selling his art on the streets and in the flea markets of Manhattan. Over the years, he experimented with an array of styles, techniques and media, from sketches and sculptures to glittered works and brightly coloured canvases. Then came the larger, detailed diagrams of flying discs and their propulsion systems, often with his theories about the mysteries of the spaceships written around the image in a hybrid language he had invented. The wide-ranging nature of Talpazan’s work makes it difficult to highlight one particular piece. However, the jewel-like diagram shown here, UFOs–Dedicat for Peace, is emblematic in style and suggestive of a mandala, a characteristic feature of his art. The drawing reveals the inner workings of a spacecraft and is illuminated by the artist’s colour-coded system that delineates the mysterious energy sources of the saucers. In the writing, he declares his six fundamental propulsion theories, expresses his desire to collaborate with NASA, and dedicates the drawing to world peace. The transformative blue light of energy that Talpazan experienced as a child can be seen emanating from the lower part of the UFO.

Daniel Wojcik is the author of Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma. His forthcoming book – Artist as Astronaut: The Otherworldly Art of Ionel Talpazan (Strange Attractor Press) – is out in December 2021.

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UFOs–Dedicat for Peace, 1999, poster paint, marker, pencil and ink on paper, 28 x 22 in. / 71 x 56 cm, photo: James Wojcik, private collection

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R AW R E V I E W S Blood from the Field Back Home

EVERYTHING THAT WASN’T WHITE: LONNIE HOLLEY Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY April 24 – September 6, 2021

TANGLED UP IN DE KOONING’S FENCE South Etna Montauk Foundation, Montauk, NY May 1 – August 29, 2021 Born in 1950 and raised in Jim Crow-era South of the US, with its violent racism, Lonnie Holley had to struggle continuously just to survive. However, once he discovered art, he found a way to put a positive spin on the past and poetically interpret the present. His big break came in 1986 when he met William Arnett, the curator and collector who established the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, bringing together and promoting a group of Black, Southern, self-taught artists, including Holley, Thornton Dial, Mary T Smith and Joe Minter among many others. Since Arnett’s death in 2020, his sons Matt and Paul have continued to promote Holley’s innovative art and music. It was Matt who connected the artist to a two-month artist residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in the autumn of 2020, which directly led to two concurrent exhibitions of his work in the Hamptons. The primary exhibition, “Everything That Wasn’t White: Lonnie Holley at the Elaine de Kooning House”, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, came together quickly after Alicia Longwell, the museum’s chief curator, paid a visit to his temporary studio, where he would go on to make more than 100 paintings, sculptures and works on paper. Without an immediate slot in the exhibition schedule, Longwell smartly shifted works from the permanent collection to clear space for a show of Holley’s work. Dynamically displayed, the exhibition features four large paintings on quilts stretched on wood panels – which represent a new way of working for the artist – and a fifth painting on canvas; eight sculptures, made from found objects, presented on pedestals and shelves and suspended from hooks; and 21 small-scale paintings on paper mounted on foam core, which are grouped and propped up on picture shelves. Quilt paintings like Blood from the Field Back Home (dated 2020, as are all the works) and Working to Loosen Our Chains – both mainly 64

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EXHIBITIONS The Memory of Grandmama's Way

monochromatic works consisting of overlapping faces in profile that have been beautifully brushed on and stencilled with spray paint – reference the South’s systematic racism and the battle to overcome it. The more colourful quilt painting The Crown goes back to the artist’s Yoruba roots, when his African ancestors were free to rule their own realm. Several of the sculptures, including the suspended Reusing the Power and the standing The Memory of Grandmama’s Way, utilise bent wire to create profiled faces of women within women. They are further embellished and connected to the past by old scraps of fabric, netting, sticks and nappy pins, with many of the assembled objects having been collected from the surrounding property of the former Abstract Expressionist’s home and studio. The brushed and spray-painted works on paper are equally inventive, with many of the sprayed objects, such as an ominous chain, looking like elements of a photogram, while the repeated and layered faces almost resemble waves, especially when presented horizontally. One particular group of paintings on paper conjures the area’s history of Abstract Expressionism. It comprises three abstract pieces – composed from sprayed and dripped colours and forms – surrounding a fourth painting of black and white faces that are close enough to embrace, as though the spirits of Willem and Elaine de Kooning had crept into Holley’s work. The second show – ironically entitled “Tangled Up in De Kooning’s Fence” – was curated by Alison Gingeras at the South Etna Montauk Foundation. It features 26 pieces – paintings, sculptures and works on paper – all rendered in similar ways. The one exception is a large hand-painted mural that holds a variety of smaller pieces, including a found photo of a black woman which Holley has altered by spray-painting haunting silhouettes of faces around the subject as well as a symbolic chain around her neck. Taken as a whole, the dual exhibitions reveal the power of this visionary artist’s humanist narrative. Working like a shaman in an improvisational way, Holley transforms recycled items – manmade and from nature – into poetic pieces of art that address the mistreatment of people of colour, as well as the abuse of the environment. It is cathartic for Holley, but a lesson to be learned for the rest of us. PAUL LASTER

EXHIBITIONS

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Unidentified artist, Untitled (spirit photograph)

Alexander Lobanov, Untitled

PHOTO BRUT, COLLECTION BRUNO DECHARME AND COMPAGNIE

sources like electrical sockets. For others, it was a realisation of fantasies, such as Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983) who in Wisconsin created provocative portraits of his wife Marie as the queen of his realm; that the crowns were made of chicken bones did not make them less real. There was also a vein of resourcefulness, from Lee Godie (1908–1994) who was homeless in Chicago for a while but posed glamorously in photo booths, enhancing the black and white images with lavish colour, to Austrian artist Leopold Strobl (b. 1960) who hunts through newspapers for images that he then gradually covers with layers of pencil like a subsuming void. While Decharme’s collection had incredible breadth, there are artists whose inclusion could have enhanced this fresh perspective on outsider art. For instance, Vivian Maier (1926–2009) – whose thousands of New York and Chicago street photographs were discovered posthumously – has been celebrated with major exhibitions but rarely considered alongside other self-taught artists who, like her, toiled quietly on work they may have never wanted us to see. Nevertheless, “PHOTO | BRUT” revealed an arresting and fascinating group of creators and encouraged a re-examination of what has been missed even in explorations of the margins. One exhibited artist, Ichiwo Sugino (b. 1965) of Japan, uses Instagram to share his metamorphic self-portraits in which, with some tape and marker, he becomes iconic figures such as Alfred Hitchcock and Che Guevara. The scrolling feed of his images in “PHOTO | BRUT” hints at more untapped work in online and virtual spaces where artists are now finding freedom for extraordinary visions. ALLISON C MEIER

American Folk Art Museum Until June 6, 2021 Just as photography was slow to be recognised as a fine art when it was introduced in the nineteenth century, the medium has often been overlooked in exhibitions of self-taught art. “PHOTO | BRUT” at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) in New York aimed to rectify this oversight with a sprawling survey of 40 artists who have used the accessibility of photography – from Polaroids and photo booths to newspaper clippings and magazine pages – in frequently obsessive and private artistic practices. Based on the collection of French filmmaker Bruno Decharme who organised the show with AFAM senior curator Valérie Rousseau, a version was previously presented at the 2019 Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. The exhibition encompassed well-known names including Henry Darger (1892–1973) – who traced his “Vivian Girls” from images in newspapers and magazines – and Morton Bartlett (1909–1992) who took unnerving photographs of lifelike plaster dolls, as well as obscure creators like a man simply known as “Frédéric” who, in 1976, in psychokinesis experiments “printed” Polaroids of his thoughts. Little unified the 400 or so pieces in “PHOTO | BRUT“, in theme or subject, but each had a sense of world-building through photography. Sometimes it was an all-consuming compulsion: German artist Horst Ademeit (1937–2010) took thousands of Polaroids to document “cold rays” and their supposed harmful

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Jean Dubuffet, Telephone Torment

EXHIBITIONS/BOOK

Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Composition n°43

JEAN DUBUFFET: BRUTAL BEAUTY Barbican Art Gallery, London May 17 – August 22, 2021

JEAN DUBUFFET: BRUTAL BEAUTY Edited by Eleanor Nairne Prestel, 2021 ISBN: 978-3-7913-5979-3 “Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty” at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, is a joy to experience. Covering the whole of the artist’s mature career, from 1944 until his death in 1985, the works have been sensitively chosen and beautifully installed by curator Eleanor Nairne and her team. From the primal, scratched lithographs of the series “Walls’” (1945) in the first room, to the vital and still-fresh gestural paintings from the final year of his life in the last. The discrete gallery spaces of the Barbican lend themselves well to a narrative of a career journey, usefully – if rather self-consciously – portioned into named dominant themes by the artist himself. Although seemingly diverse at first glance, Dubuffet’s art shares a concern for the very matter of painting. Each new phase is an essay in wrestling with, and attempting to elicit, meaning from a kind of primal formlessness. At times, this borders on total abstraction, as in the “Texturologies” from the late 1950s and the final “Mires” series. But his work always somehow clings to a concern for the human experience. Readers of Raw Vision will, of course, know Dubuffet as the inventor of the term art brut and as the first great collector of 68

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Jean Dubuffet, The Tree of Fluids

this kind of work. The Barbican acknowledges this by devoting two full rooms in the exhibition to art brut. Since Dubuffet’s encounter with, and intense interest in, such art was one of the catalysts for the work that heralded his initial embrace by the contemporary art world in the mid-1940s, it is fitting that the first art brut room appears early on. Interestingly, it is devoted to an imagined exhibition of work that might have appeared in an unrealised final art brut show at Galerie René́ Drouin, Paris, which had for a time given over a basement space to Dubuffet’s Foyer de l’Art Brut. This approach allowed the curators to expose viewers to some intensely coloured work by artists such as Aloïse Corbaz, Fleury-Joseph Crépin and Maurice Baskine, in stark contrast to the monochrome postwar brutalism of the Dubuffet works in the first two rooms, and the fluid, expressive deformations of the room of “Ladies Bodies” which come afterwards. The second art brut room marks the return of Dubuffet’s collection to him in Paris in 1961 after a decade stored in Long Island, New York. The room is a literal move into light, after the darkness of the previous one, and – in place of Dubuffet’s impossibly busy images of Paris crowds – viewers encounter cool, ordered art brut images by Madge Gill, Laure Pigeon, Gaston Duf and Adolf Wölfli, among others. A beautifully illustrated book accompanies the exhibition. Including excellent essays by experts on Dubuffet and art brut, it is an important addition to the Dubuffet literature as well as a fitting memory of the show. COLIN RHODES