Autumn 2008 Field notes

FIELD NOTES: - A Cavin-Morris Gallery Newsletter

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FIELD NOTES: A Cavin-Morris Gallery Newsletter

Autumn,2008 Welcome to this inaugural issue of our gallery's newsletter. We hope to bring this to you quarterly with gallery news, articles on artists, interviews, spotlights on artists and pieces and to let you feel some of the excitement we have in developing our knowledge and experience in working with self-taught artists, Asian textiles, Art Brut, Indigenous Drawings, Contemporary Ceramics Asian and Western, and select works of tribal and textile art from around the world.

Welcome to our First Newsletter...

By Editor Sun, Oct 05, 2008

Welcome to the premier issue of Cavin-Morris Gallery's Newsletter: Field Notes.

In the last couple of years as we opened up our Ceramic and Textile departments and continued to add to and widen our Tribal Collection and our representation of Art Brut, Indigenous Drawing and Neuve Invention we began to realize that the classic exhibition tradition was just too slow for all the activities going on behind the scenes in the gallery. We needed a new way to let our client base and the art world in general know what changes and discoveries were taking place in all the departments of the gallery. In addition we

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wanted to add a little more spin by occasionally mentioning books, records and films that we felt were relevant to work the gallery is showing. So please have a look at our book and music choices in the Columns section. We believe Field Notes will be a means of furthering these communications.

But it isn't going to be a static publication. There will be four seasonal releases a year and during the three months of each release we will be constantly adding to all the magazine's features including press releases, editorials, new acquisitions, schedules, short features on new and more established gallery artists in all our departments.

By connecting the Field Notes with a wider photo archive we will be able to expand the selections on our soon to be updated website: www.cavinmorris.com. We have a lot of plans and so we encourage you to bookmark the site or subscribe and check in often.

We are glad you can join us.

Randall Morris Shari Cavin Mariko Tanaka and the staff at Cavin-Morris Gallery

Showing This Month! Visions Drawn before Dawn: Anna Zemankova Centennial Show

By Editor Fri, Sep 12, 2008 aboveC

Visions Drawn Before Dawn: A Centennial Celebration of Anna Zemánková (1908 – 1986) October 16 – November 22, 2008 Opening Reception: Thursday, October 16, 2008 6-8 PM

It is with great pleasure that Cavin-Morris Gallery presents Visions Drawn Before Dawn: A Centennial Celebration of Anna Zemánková. In the 16 years we have represented the artist's estate and been in the presence of her drawings, we have remained in awe of her reinvention, re-assimilation, and

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renewal of the natural forces that release Nature's aesthetic in her work.

The layers of evocation in her drawings seem unending. She channeled great music, both classical and jazz, into her work, struggling with it to create a new way of thinking and engaging the world, allowing her to express love, wonder and Eros, and ultimately of using her art as a means to extend the reach of her life beyond the world of the mundane.

It must be understood that these ethereal gardens she drew are part of a fascinating phenomenon of self-shaping, in that she created for herself a new rite of passage, one that came after the more ordinary rites of work and family, and allowed her to celebrate herself as a maker, a creator of synaesthesia, where the senses of sight and touch perform midnight variations in a mix that is mythological, intellectual and reverberatingly sensual.

This group of newly released drawings is a cross-section of the four phases of Zemรกnkovรก's work as it changed over the years. First there were her bold gestural pastels followed by work with obsessive detailed patterning and unusual color combinations. It was with this second phase of her work that she began to sign her name to her drawings. In the third phase she combined elements from the first two periods and then embroidered and drew with pen on top of the work. In the last phase she collaged her drawings into simple and elegant forms, and began cutting and painting satin into collages.

Anna Zemรกnkovรก's drawings are in the collections of Le Musee d'art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland; Collection abcd, Paris, France; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM; American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY; and the Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI.

For further information please contact Shari Cavin, Randall Morris or Mariko Tanaka at 212-226 3768, or scavin@cavinmorris.com.

Self-Taught Artists, What's New at Cavin-Morris,

New Drawing by Takashi Shuji

By Gallery Sat, Oct 25, 2008

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Takashi Shuji Shimeji (Japanese Mushroom), bottle, cups and pot, 2007 Cardboard, pastel 29 x 16.25 inches 73.7 x 41.3 cm ShT 2 Born in 1974 in Hyogo Prefecture, Takashi Shuji makes drawings that are tone poems filled with mood and mystery, no less so because they are usually of everyday objects. In a way this is a very cultural insight as a major aspect of the traditional Japanese aesthetic is to pare away and allude to the intense essence of animate and inanimate things. Like a ceramist shaping a tea bowl or a sake cup he constantly adds and erases for what can be hours till he is satisfied with the result.

Contemporary Japanese and related Ceramics, What's New at Cavin-Morris,

Contemporary Tea Ceremony Bowls (Chawans)

By Gallery Fri, Oct 24, 2008

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Self-Taught Artists, What's New at Cavin-Morris,

New Pushpa Kumari Drawing!

By Gallery Wed, Oct 22, 2008

Self-Taught Artists,

The Exalted Lark: Excerpts from an Essay on Anna Zemankova

By R. Morris Sat, Oct 18, 2008 There are some rare and fortunate times in one’s life when one is allowed by intent sometimes, yet most often by fluke or by luck, to witness on some sensual level a beauty that is completely unadulterated and heartpiercingly direct. Mankind has never invented an adequate eschatology of words to match those moments.

They have no laws, they are limited to no locality. They are the times when something outside you comes inside you on an aesthetic joyride whether it be witnessing a helix of homing pigeons in a trick of afternoon light, a sounding whale in a wine-dark sea, a string plucked on a moonlit kora in a moment just before it is joined by a

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voice singing the glorious history of ancestors, a sonata, an orgasm, the first laugh in a new human being, a mark made by light on a sun-spattered wall or firelight on a perfect skin in a midnight dance, or on a piece of paper held in place by a turned-on sentient being in an empty room before dawn.

This is beauty that inspires awe. This is beauty that is terrible in its grandeur, beauty that is bladed, a razor sharp knife. The chuff of a tigress. The sibilant hiss of something unknown in a forest thicket, the beautiful but dangerous warning of a wasp.

I am not sure that Anna Zemankova deliberately set out to make this kind of beauty. I am more sure that it represents the outcome of a struggle for some kind of inner balance, a way of bursting out of the cage of her physical and emotional body, a way of thinking about things,of attempting to will an equilibrium. It was certainly a way of personally re-ordering the world. Life had drawn boundaries for her, shackling her spirit with age, a feeling of abandonment and disease and she reacted first with frustration, then anger and finally with this ancient ululation of art-making that lasted her till the end and continues now beyond the physical. Her life was ultimately successful then. She took a chance, dared to tap into something eternal and succeeded.

Zemankova had put aside her earliest art-making desires in reluctant deference to a lucrative career; dentistry. She was good at whatever she chose to do. Ultimately she left dentistry to raise her family. An ascending stairway of sidetracks followed her; she left the dream of art to further a career, left the career to further her family; the family grew up and dispersed in a natural series of rites of passage and she was left with no art, no household to be the matriarch over, no need then for her nurturing senses, no career and a body beginning to sense the coming on of its own Autumn.

We look at the drawings and think we might see references to things we recognize, say perhaps insects, flowers, plants, birds, butterflies etc. They are ancestral, cultural, popular, and most importantly they are intuited and reinvented. The moment is shaped and caressed from the non-evident. Each line is pulled thin like the nerve in a tooth, each mark repeated often to soothe and assuage and achieve the bulk of a prayer, a mantra, or end as a question sometimes answered, sometimes not…a koan . Undoubtedly these things are there but it must be understood that there are also references there to so much we don’t see. They aren’t solipsistic. They aren’t closed to us. We can feel the pain or the joy without necessarily dissecting the specifics of the circumstances. When such art transcends the immediate personal and flies like an exaltation of larks with the universally numinous it is no longer merely a physical process.

Synaesthesia is creating a Babel from the languages of the senses all manifesting at once. To see sound and to hear sight, would be examples. Her work is deeply synaesthetic. It will come as no surprise when she tells us that music provided a catalyst to her creating. Music was a fellow force her art-making met in

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the interstices of Nature and she used it to explore the eroticism of known and unknown forms. She listened to Bach, Beethoven, she listened to Janacek, and she listened to Charles Lloyd. At that time Lloyd was also seeking light with a horn sound that could whisper of the sublime or scream in the positive rage he had been freed to express by the tone poems of John Coltrane. In addition to his saxophone his flute playing was not about the formalism of the instrument but about the sensing of multicultural sunlit essences of the sublime art can convey. She would have loved Don Cherry’s music as well had she heard him. She was drawn to how artists made choices that skirted dangerous chasms and reached for exhilarating heights. At that time Charles Lloyd had that great channeler of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart filtered through the blues and Semitic clarity; Keith Jarrett. Together with the multi-rhythmic intelligence of Jack Dejohnette on drums they were juggling new musical ideas like animated fireflies. I can see the music rising from the speakers like electrified bees, hovering around her head, traveling through her heart and hands and taking deliciously structured form on her on her papers where, like the music, she she threw large powdery forms down as a bass line and then contrasted improvisation, color, texture, femininity vs. masculinity, whisper versus shouts or just sugary dark iridescence against the strong backgrounds. Funk or fugue she allowed improvisation to always hold hands with stark control.

You can hear her drawings if you open up enough to them. But she added things to the music, her own instrumentation, the sounds of insects magnified to distortion, the sounds of thorns and spines, the sounds of air as it fuses like nuclear energy with color.

Her art, her music, her muses aren’t a steady stream of predictable imagery, either. So often we have watched people approach it with that ‘why are you showing me florals’ look of weariness and then we watch their nostrils dilate as the impact hits them; that they are, in reality, looking at something for which few precedents exist.

Meeting Terezie, her granddaughter, and knowing of the closeness of the family one imagines one can feel some of Anna Zemankovas’ spice in the grand-daughter’s quick mind and movements. For Terezie’s sense of nurturing art, commitment to the idea of home, of place, of family but always especially her excitement by what Art is. The granddaughter inspired her and shares her dedication to the edge of ideas, to wild and deep music, to the art of the self-taught, to Art Brut, that neighborhood of Art which moves backward, laterally and forward all at the same time. It is easy to see how she might have inspired her grandmother in the following quote from that interview: “I watch how my granddaughter draws. And nobody tells her what to do, she wouldn’t listen. They leave her alone. And that’s right. She can’t help herself from saying, ”Grandma! Look what I made! Isn’t it good?” And I know from my own experience, that it is good. I would hate for someone to tell me…put that flower on the other side! No, never!”

Zemankova’s work is a cry sent out to and from ancestors who came before her and are here now. If you read the interview with her by Pavel Konechny you can see how through the drawings she interacted with her family. This is no surprise, really, they were all artists. This family spoke in art as well as words and so there were all these extra paths of communication. They understood and deeply respected the

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songs she drew. They understood better than anyone that the art making was Anna Zemankova’s wild song of health.

Self-Taught Artists,

Interview with Anna Zemankova

By Gallery Sat, Oct 18, 2008 INTERVIEW WITH ANNA ZEMÁNKOVA

When did you begin creating?

You know, when I was seventeen, I loved to draw.

Landscapes and things, I still have a few of them. I didn’t show them much. Sometimes I entered into fantasy, but only sometimes, and then not at all. Then I got married.

Yes, and I wanted to go to a school for drawing. But my parents wouldn’t allow it. People saw things differently then, you know how it was. So I put it in the attic and moved on. And then I got married in Olomouc, the wedding was in Hejcín, in the new Catholic church there. I had a beautiful wedding, when I think back on it….well, it’s been 48 years now. And then painting was out of my thoughts. When my son, the eldest, studied medicine, all of a sudden those two came with their second son. We had it here in the cellar, that suitcase. I never told anyone that I painted!

I never mentioned it. And then he asked whose drawings they were. So I said they were mine. They couldn’t believe it, that I had drawn them. So then my med student kept asking me to paint. “Me, what would I paint? I have other responsibilities!” Then they bought me coloured pencils and paper, so I could draw. So I made some drawings….and they were ecstatic. I said “Sure, I’ll draw you something, I’ll draw you one of my fantasies.” Then he told me, and I think back on it often, “Draw Ma! When you get older and you have this hobby, you’ll be happier in your old age!” And I think back on him often, that I listened, and I drew, and that I have that to this day…you know, when I draw something, that fulfills the bargain, it brings me boundless joy and lets me unwind. And then I move on.

I live here alone, but I always have something to do. But my eyes are not too good. So when I do these tiny things…I thrive on these miniatures but my eyes are not so good, I can’t do them. Right now.

I’ve been drawing twenty years now, I started in, oh…’sixty… ‘fifty eight.

Did anyone in your family draw?

No, but there were other artists in our family tree. My father’s cousin was a famous actress – Paula

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Veselá, in Austria. The older generation knows her. And on my mother’s side, their father’s were brothers, there was a famous opera singer, Herma Zárská. You know, that was an artistic branch of the family, but not in drawing. It’s interesting, that my son the sculptor, his artistic gifts began when he was also 16 and 17, just like me. My father was a barber and my mother was at home. She was one of three sisters ad she was different from them, very different, You know, my grandfather, he was a master mason, in that time they were really builders. He even made up blueprints, he was quite gifted. My parents were from Príbor (the birthplace of Sigmund Freud – PK). My mom often stayed in Olomouc with her uncle and there she met my father and there I was born. I studied to be a dental specialist, and I worked at that until I was wed. I really enjoyed it. I even operated. But I like drawing more, that’s for sure!

How did you make your drawings?

I draw here… on this table. See how inspiration is? Sometimes I recognize that I saw something.

Sometimes maybe I see something… sort of a deep feeling, that a person has inside, that stays with me a and then I put it onto paper later. But sometimes not, sometimes I create during drawing. You know, I make a sketch, and then I change the sketch until I’m happy with it, and then I color it in. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes not. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with it. So I usually put them up on the wall and look at them… and maybe it’ll come in a few days! And sometimes it happens that I work on the picture for a long time… for a long time. Sometime when someone comes to see me and I show them my work and we find something missing, and there should be something there, so then I put it aside. And that could be a couple of years! And then I fix it.

Do you have a favorite colour?

Well, I do have a favorite. I like yellow… Then I like orange… well, actually all the colours, except for black. However, you do see black occasionally. I don’t know why I have such an aversion towards black, but sometime I need to put it in, see how I’m always in twist, you know? I’ll show you how I work… it’s on fabric. I always say ”I’ve got the chessboard out.” I change it several times, until it seems ok to me. Well, it will work out… I already have an idea. Maybe on this satin I’ll make one thing next to another, maybe a whole flower. Then you’ll see it in the work and then from that… that’s my method. I’m very pleased by this method, it’s mine, it doesn’t come from anyone else, you know? And that’s something I prize, that nobody tells me how to do something, I just do it. And I think that that is a good way. I watch how my granddaughter draws. And nobody tells her what to do, she wouldn’t listen. They leave her alone. And that’s right. She can’t help herself from saying, “Grandma, look what I made! Isn’t it good?” And I know from my own experience, that it is good. I would hate for someone to tell me… put that flower on the other side! No, never!

Do you thing there exists some sort of relationship between your picture and music?

Well now ! There are many… I can even tell you what music I was listening to while drawing. I really love janácek. I sure do love janácek. When I started to fall in love with his music, it took a lot of work for me to

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approach it. It was really difficult. Or take Beethoven! My daughter can play the piano beautifully. She can play Beethoven’s Appassionata… isn’t that something! And when she began to play, I would grab my kit and begin to draw. I drew and drew while she played. She plays marvelously. Sure… I can draw while listening to music. I couldn’t work if it were quiet, no. My thoughts would wander! I must have my thoughts connected to the whole. And music has helped me a lot. For example chamber music… I really like those kinds of things. And sometimes someone will tell you, “That’s really something else!” And I’ll say, yes, I did it while listening to a different kind of music. You know, I am catching those different tones which I later give shape to. That’s it.

What kind of changes has your work gone through?

My work has gone through huge changes. The steps were very slow. What you see today, and if you saw the beginnings… well, what a difference! A huge difference. And I always say, whenever I created something, that’s it, I’m finished. And I’m convinced, that I can’t go on. But again and again I come up with another thing. It sows it’s seeds on me, it comes to me by itself, you know. It comes to me itself.

What does creative work mean to you?

It means a lot to me. Life enriches me, enriches me with such… such… I can say that when I’m painting I’m more balanced, calmer, so… well, it gives a lot, art. It sorts me out. Before, I was not as I am now! I was so aggressive, really sort of aggressive and unstable. Now I’m rather mild, balanced, calm. I don’t have days when I’m angry. No, I take care or things calmly. And what art gives me is… it releases me from material things. You know, when a person is released from material concerns… it’s easier. Not that I would renounce all material things, no, but I don’t long for material goods. I always say, “ Only what I need, and no more!” I think it’s foolish when one is attached to material things. I think it’s ridiculous today.

And when a person is removed from that, it’s good. I keep thinking a step higher. I think that people who are attached to material possessions are stuck on the ground floor… Yes, and to also have a good heart!

You know? That applies to everyone. And I’m satisfied with my life. I have taken advantage of all that was given me. And I put it to good use. You know, I see it in my kids. I have great kids, generous kids.

Do you give your pictures titles?

I don’t give my pictures titles, because everyone can see something different in them. I’ve already noticed that every person has a different feeling about them. I have one feeling and another person has a totally different feeling, so I don’t know. I think I told you once: “Is that healthy? The person who is working on it should name it!” But once on television I heard a Soviet sculptor, of abstracts, talking. He made beautiful things. And they asked him, what are they called? He would ask his friends and then decide after listening to what they had thought. And so I would say, “I agree, to hell with it. That is healthy! So it’s the same for me, it’s nothing unusual.”

What technique do you use?

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Various – tempera, oils, dyes, pastels, ballpoints. Well, anything there is, I use. I’ve done a lot of things in twenty years. You know, it doesn’t give me pleasure that people from abroad are interested in me. I would prefer it of my work was in my country. If my people had it. So I’m not after success abroad, not interested in sending things away. I was so happy from [the exhibition in] Litomêrice, enormously happy.

Even when I gave them it for free. I had such enormous joy that the work stayed here. Lots of Czech artists have my drawings.

What are the sources of your inspiration?

Nobody knows. Me neither, when I think about it. Why? Where did it come from? There’s a big question mark hanging over it for me too. Some sources? No, I don’t feel anything, not like that. I can’t really say much about that. Really, I don’t know what to say, how to answer that. Because I don’t have any sources, I’d… simply I can create and talk with you. That’s interesting, you know. I prefer calm when I paint. And when I paint, I paint, and then it’s obvious… But I could maybe take some paper, talk with you now and then I could paint a subject.

But now I’ve done a drawing for you and it was pretty, pretty… sensational, you know? I had to look at it again, how I made it… But still I didn’t like it and I thought about it for a fortnight: “I have to re-do it, it’s not working for me!” Markêta saw it. And I pay attention to her. She doesn’t talk much. But when I see that she doesn’t say anything, she’s just looking at it, then I’m thinking that she’s found something there.

She brought me around. And so I changed it a bit. Yes, and now I am happy with it. Its interesting, when I’m not happy with something, I get all agitated. I keep thinking about it, you know? And I have the best thoughts when I get up early. Then I always come up with something! Later, not so much, I’m too scattered. Me, when I get up early, I think about something. Maybe a theme. But I don’t see it a hundred percent clearly, just the beginnings. And then I create it while working. Capture it. It’s the same as when a composer hears a certain tone. Maybe a pot falls on the floor and he hears it ring. He captures the tone… and then it’s motion. It’s as of he’s found the key to something. And it’s the same with drawing.

And when poets write. It’s enough to capture one line, I don’t know where it comes from. And then it’s in motion. They’re mysteries which are not solved, and probably never will be.

What are you working on at present?

My son promised me butterflies. You know, he has a set of beautiful butterflies. Tropical ones. But he still hasn’t given them to me. So I said to myself, I’ll draw them. And so I did. Here, take a look… It’s interesting how I came to that while working. That’s cut-out, that’s pressed, that’s sculpted. For me, drawings that are done normally have nothing to say. So then I tried to cut through the sculpted ones, so that they would approach reality. And it worked…! This one has a lilac colour… They’re not like the butterflies here, but they are butterflies… maybe it will fly sometime. Sure, nobody knows. I don’t rack my brains over it… I draw it. Yes, take a look at those rainbow colours! They’ve come close. But now I’ll show you some butterflies which are really amazing. Take a look. These ones don’t resemble our butterflies. They’re more like birds. You know, when you look at them, there’s life there. The sculpted

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effect does that. If they were drawn normally, no…

I really love my daughter-in-law, the sculptor. She’s a very unusual girl. And I had a bird which everyone admired. When someone looked at him they’d go… oh! And Markêta, when she saw him, used to say: “Oh, he’s so beautiful!” And the last time she was here I said, “ Wouldn’t you like to have him?”

And she said, “ Mother, would you give him to me?: And I said, “ You know I would!” So I brought him over and she was overjoyed. And with Markêta it is especially exhilarating, because she knows what is good. She know… it’s fantasy, you know!

What do you like best to create?

I can’t tell you what I like best to paint. Every picture is dear to me. Every picture is dear, when it’s finished. And when I put it aside and I draw, then the new one is dear, And for the past 24 years that I have been drawing, so far I have never thrown one out! Even if I wasn’t crazy about the subject. It’s happened that I drew half of it in a completely different way. I’ve never thrown anything away. I really think about them quite a bit. I take every drawing seriously.

And now I want to show you the birds on satin. Sure, take a look…! That incredible softness… You know how satin shimmers and makes a life-like structure. I love working with it. I thought of it myself. I didn’t have paper. I always arrive at something out of desperation. I had a piece of satin and I said to myself: “I wonder if I could paint on that?” Si I tried it, and see for yourself, it worked! Most of the time when I change a technique, it’s always out of necessity. I run out of something, you know…? Now I’ll show you a bird which has a propeller. Imagine that. You know, the propeller turns and allows him to fly. See how it turns? There, that is beautifully represented. That’s all from the satin, otherwise it’s ballpoints, That was a lot of work, enough for five other drawings. You have to have very precise fingers to do it. You have to put it aside after awhile on account of your eyes… And here are some drawings on silk. You have to prepare the silk first from behind. If you just cut the silk it would fray. It took me a lot of work to get it right.

Now I know the trick. Whenever I paint on material, it takes special paints. You can get them… well, not always. You see… this is the four-story satellite of y fantasies. Can you see it? In my fantasies the butterflies and birds are not sitting on the ground, but in the branches. And then the branch strongly resembles the bird. See it, sitting on the branch, on the leaves… there’s a kind of hawk, see it? And here are doves. Sure, they’re different… here is softness and silkiness.

And when I later look and see what I’ve done, I tell you, I feel good. I feel really good. And not out of pride, no. When I die, I’ll leave them for my children. And they can do what they want with them. Just so they get them, and they’re distributed fairly. I know what Mammon does to a person. No person is good who has too much. I’d rather live humbly and live a beautiful life. I’ve always been afraid of money. It scares me. Because ho who has a lot of it, is bad. I’m so glad it occurred to me to paint on fabrics… See the softness here and the density here.

But it’s interesting, I came up with it myself. Now I’ve bought some new kinds of paper. But I have never found any on which I would paint the same subject. If I do, if I start to repeat myself, I might as well pack it in.

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Spring 1980, Prague The text is a partly edited and abridged transcript of an interview recorded by Pavel Konecny during preperation of the lecture “Fantaskní tvorba Anny Zemánkové” (“The Fantasy Work of Anna Zemánková”), which was given at Divaldo hudby (The Olomouc Music Theatre) on 28 May 1980.

Previously Exhibited: Sabhan Adam: Painting With Smoke

By Editor Fri, Sep 12, 2008

SABHAN ADAM: PAINTING WITH SMOKE September 4 – October 11, 2008 Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present the paintings and drawings of the singular self-taught artist, Sabhan Adam. His subjects mostly figurative seem to live in a place that tears the watcher out of complacency into an uncomfortable almost hallucinogenic plane of existence where any reference to beauty depends on a level of discomfiture.

There is anger, a righteous anger that is tempered by a sharp-edged sense of humor. The work seethes with an almost literary sense of cosmic punishment meted out by an unfriendly universe that shares a distant relationship with Kafka’s post-Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa or the caterpillar in Through The Looking Glass. We are ushered into an unnamable place where caricature becomes very serious.

There isn’t other work like Sabhan Adam’s coming out of the Arab World right now. His polemic is human and generalized rather than strictly local. There is very little sacred geometry in what he does, and what he depicts is an expressionistic distortion of the human form. He has a sensitivity to costume in an off-kilter way that is as rich as embroidery. His figures rise from the canvas like djinn. They come from a place that is earthly and metaphysical simultaneously. An earlier exhibition of his work was entitled “Ethereal”, an especially relevant term because it is so easy to get engrossed in the

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non-empirical enigmas of the work that one can forget how skillfully they are made. It is as if Adam were drawing with a paint made of smoke and tar.

Perhaps his words say it best: The only thing I own is my drawing. Most of people sit on chairs, talk numb and don’t understand what I am going through, and that blood is coming out of my eyes. Only my parents saw me drawing.” Another silence, then: “in the middle of the vertigo of my spirit, a path takes form and leads the way.” He hesitates and says: “if I hadn’t drawn I would have been no body. I don’t want to hear the sound of the sea the way it should be heard. Sometimes, I wish I had burnt my paintings. Present is the only thing that matters.

Painter or dustman, so what?

I am having hard time understanding people. I enjoy God’s company! I talk from the inside and most of the people are not interested in that. I do embrace time and space in a single move.

My talk is like the wind. I wonder why people talk or write about me; what I am is something else. I hate human relationships, openings. I love nonsense; I love God and the prophets.

Humanity is just like hunger or sleep, that’s all. Beggars or kings, it’s all the same, and that is the way they are in my paintings. Joy is not my topic. Pain, disabled and handicapped people; that is my world.

Things change around me, I don’t. People talk without being connected to their spirit. May God demolish their houses!

For further information please contact Shari Cavin, Mariko Tanaka or Randall Morris at (212) 226 3768, by email: MTanaka@cavinmorris.com.

Gallery News and Projects,

Happening stuff....

By Gallery Sat, Oct 25, 2008 News 10/10/08: Randall Morris and Mariko Tanaka will be curating the San Francisco Arts of Pacific Asia special exhibition at Fort Mason Center Festival Pavillion from February 6-8, 2009. http://www.caskeylees.com/shows/3/asian/sf/events/

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Randall Morris will be curating two special exhibition for the San Francisco Tribal & Textile Arts Show titled Conversing with Culture: Paintings and Drawings by Jose Bedia and Indigenous Drawings: Works by Self-taught artists from Non-Western Cultures from February 13-15, 2009 at Fort Mason Center Festival Pavillion.

We welcome Frank Parga to the gallery, and congratulate him on opening his new art studio space in Brooklyn.

For more info: www.frankparga.com Shari Cavin has completed her certification for Art Appraisers Association of America in Self-Taught and Outsider Art. Additionally she has written the exam for future appraisers to get certified for Self-Taught and Outsider Art field.

Mariko Tanaka, independent curator is appointed vice-chair to the Art Gallery for Siggraph Asia 2009, the largest U.S. conference and exhibition in Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, launching for the first time in Yokohama, Japan. http://www.siggraph.org/asia2008/

Upcoming Art Fairs: Treasures Show for Antique and Unique Decorative Objects, Textiles and Wearable Art, October 24-26, 2008.

University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 Cavin-Morris Gallery will feature Japanese Ceramics and Textiles, and Tribal Art. http://www.museum.upenn.edu/new/events/treasures/index.shtml

OUTSIDER ART FAIR JANUARY 9 - 11 NEW DATES & LOCATION THE MART, 7 West 34th Street, New York City The San Franciso Arts of Pacific Asia Show February 6th-8th, 2009 Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA The San Francisco Tribal & Textile Arts Show February 13th-15th, 2009 Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA

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Our Kinds of Music, Gallery News and Projects,

Our Kinds of Music Music from around the World you might hear at the gallery or during our openings. We will update this section constantly.

10/5/08 1.- Calexico- Carried to Dust Quarterback Records 2008 This band is one of the ones I would take with me when I disappear into the South western desert. They are Masters of the evocation of Place with their refined mariachi brass, their genius drummer and their great songwriting and evocative guitar.

2.- Lila Downs- Shake Away Blue Note Label Group 2008 Less Cafe than her last outing, this one finds her more jazzy but still very edgy. Fewer ballads but a smoking version of Black Magic Woman. She was the singer in the movie Frida and I have always felt she would have made a better Frida than Selma. Looks more like her also.

3.- Ali Farka Toure and Toumane Diabate- In the Heart of the Moon World Circuit 2005 The music on this CD is as close to its title as you can get. They fill silence with visionary delicacy the way a Bach cello sonata does. This is healing and spiritual music for these damaging times.

4.- Shantel- Bucovina Cub Mixture Mixtape 2 Crammed Esay Records 2008 I can't play this when clients come into the gallery because it makes my body twitch in odd rhythmic ways. Shantel is an amazing DJ who has reworked great gypsy music into a positive and sometimes hilarious debauch without any sacrifice of musicality.

5.- Elvis Perkins- Ash Wednesday XL Recordings 2007 A pure and beautiful CD of exquisite and generous songwriting. Perkins was the son of Anthony Perkins and recorded this CD after his mother, on returning from his fathers' funeral went down on the

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9/11 plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. Despite that the music is uplifting and energizing like a forest at dawn. The song 'While You Were Sleeping" is one of the greatest American songs ever written...up there with Dock of the Bay, A Change is Gonna Come and Tangled Up in Blue, to name a few.

6.- Carolina Chocolate Drops Presents Sankofa Strings- Colored Aristocracy Music Maker 2007 A contemporary African-American String band playing old-timey music but with a slight twist. Sounding often like an old jug band it is great hearing violin and guitar sound like this.

7.- Watcha Clan- Diaspora Hi-fi Piranha Music 2008 Smoking on the dance floor, smoking on the stage this band rewards with its combination of Balkan, Jamaican, North African and hip hop among others. From Great Britain, they are loud and rhythmic and just starting to be known in the United States.

8.- Africa Remix Milan Records 2007 This is the CD that accompanied the Art exhibition of the same name that showed self-taught African Artists as artists and as part of a phenomenon that accepts and expands outside influences without losing its roots integrities. The art should outrage purists and the music raises the bar as well.

9.- Back Roads to Cold Mountain Smithsonian Folkways Recordings 2004 This CD plays like a mountain spring, clear cool and very very refreshing. The field holler in the first cut is worth the price alone but there is much much more from black and white gospel to banjo and pure blues. Despite the disparate roots the American feel to it is palpable.

10.- Bunny Wailer- Blackheart Man Island Def Jam Music Group 1976/2002 I last heard this in college and so it was with a bit of trepidation that I played it again and with a sense of relief and great enjoyment heard the power and intensity of its messages. They are still relevant in this bashed up world. Jamaica is listening itself to roots music again and this CD has a definite Old Master quality to it. Highly recommended.

11.- Nation Beat- Legends of the Preacher Modiba 2008 I ran into this group through total serendipity this summer while surfing musical sites. At first I thought

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they were an army of drums and violins playing Mexican matachin music but then I heard the Brazilian bottom come through. They sing Hank Williams songs a couple of times to a neo-samba beat. The vibe is up and healthy and sinuous. They are moving up very fast.

Just In- Afrissippi Blues and African combined. More later.

Books, Gallery News and Projects,

Books Some relevant books we'd recommend: 1.- Art Brut du Japon Collection de l'Art Brut Infolio 2008 This important new catalog is one of several that are finally making clear to the field that there is a huge number of artists unknown to the West who have been making art for a while. Our knowledge of Asian self-taught artists is woefully lacking. There is another catalog we will list later that came out the same time as this one of Art Brut artists touring in Japan with Japanese self-taught artists. These collections open up again the whole discussion on the validity of workshops and how foolish it would be not to redefine what we think of as 'workshop' art.

2.- Mali Blues- Lieve Joris Lonely Planet Publications 1998 A moving portrait of the Mali music scene by someone who went and met Bouboucare Traore and became involved in the personal dimensions of culture clash as urban and rural combine in Africa.

3.- Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers: Edited by Kobena Mercer INIVA and the MIT Press 2008 Essays dealing with emigres to other cultures who became involved with the arts and encouraged or influenced the flowering of new modernist-based movements. Great for post-colonial views on cultural hybridity.

4.- Three Eyes for the Journey; African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience-Dianne

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Stewart Oxford Press- 2005 The most up-to-date and concise look at Caribbean religion and made clear in a way that can be extremely useful to those who don't have a great familiarity with Caribbean African-rooted theologies.

There has not been a book like this one and it is indispensible to those interested in the African Diaspora including the US. 5.- True-Born Maroons- Kenneth Bilby University Pres of Florida 2005 Kenneth Bilby is one of the visionaries in understanding New World Religion and music. He is a hands-on scholar and this book does not disappoint. He allows the Maroons from all time periods to tell their own stories from mundane to visionary.

6.- 1491- New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus- Charles C. Mann Vintage Press 2006 This book tells you what America was the day before Columbus got there. It is told by a writer who you reluctantly take leave of when the book is over. One point that blew me away in particular was that the forests and landscapes of much of North America were under the agricultural custodianship of the tribes. They were huge wild carefully tended gardens that were integral to living conditions. By the end you see this country in ways completely new.

7.- Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art Fred Myers Duke University Press 2002 Of interest to all those who want to know how art movements (in this case Aboriginal) take form and the issues involved. It goes beyond just stories of exploitation into the very fabric of the culture itself. ' 8.- Ganga Devi- Tradition and Expression in Mithila Painting- Jyotindra Jain Khantha Corporation 1997 A great book by a great and understanding writer about an indian self-taught artist who broke with and expanded traditional women's art in India. Often heartbreaking and ultimately inspiring in a grand way.

9.- Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists edited by Leslie Umberger Princeton Architectural Press 2007 One of the most important catalogs to come out in the American aspect of the field in the last year. If one reads between the lines in this book one comes to realize how inesacapable the fact is that all work by most self-taught artists especially when it is culturally rooted comes from an essentially environmental

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vision. The book has easily become one of the base-lines of our field.

10.- Netherland- Joseph O'Neill Pantheon Books 2008 A novel about a man in New York who, sometimes despite himself, comes to see how cultures intermesh and how the world resounds in times and places that seem only local on the surface.

11.- NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith Yale University Press 2008 Based on the phrase by Ishmael Reed and in a show that opens at PS 1 in October this is a great catalog of only for the essay by Greg Tate which is black music verbalized and the pictures but it goes even beyond with an interview with Reed, an older essay by Robert Farris Thompson and an essay by Danto among others. The major major flaw of this show is that it left out the self-taught African-American artists and thus becomes an unwitting part of the injury it seeks to redress. Important and interesting nontheless. For this reason the parts become more important than the whole.

Copyright Š 2010 FIELD NOTES: • Press Publisher Online Publishing System

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