Georgia Folk Artist R. A. Miller paints a Snake. Outsider Art

Georgia Folk Artist R. A. Miller paints a Snake.
Original Photo Jim Linderman c. 1995

Vintage Amateur Original Drawings for Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine

Vintage Amateur Original Drawings for Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine submitted by a boy.  Famous Monsters was started in 1958 and ran until 1983 with 191 issues.  Later, a revival from 1993 brought it back and it continues today.  These drawings were submitted for publication in a "submitted by fans" section of the magazine.  While I do not know if any were printed, the editor Forrest J. Ackerman kept this collection for decades in his private collection until passing.  There are some 50 drawings which reveal a young talent under the spell of prominent monsters (and monster films) of the 1950s and 1960s.

Collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Basil Merrett Outsider Art The Religious Series c. 1950 Collection Jim Linderman

Basil Merrett Outsider Art The Religious Series c. 1950 Collection Jim Linderman.  Each drawn (while institutionalized) on hand-cut 4" x 5" cardboard. See also the book Eccentric Folk Art Drawings by Jim Linderman

Annual I'm not at the Outsider Art Fair 2017 post. Are Cartoonists Outsider Artists? Elizabeth Stohn and Fred Johnson

These drawings were done from 1918 to 1919 by Elizabeth Stohn.  Ms Stone was a child at the time, and was something of a "cross-category" artist.  Part Schoolgirl art, part naive, part trained (as she had just completed her "art school training" by correspondence school. )  Certainly not what is generally considered "outsider" art, though that term is pretty widely applied as far as I can tell.  These are folky and charming, but not really folk art either.  Outsider Art? Nah.
 
While thousands of women studied art and (like Ms. Stohn) aspired to be an artist, even naming early woman artists is hard.  They were screwed over ever since they were here in every field.  Why should art (or comics, for that matter) be the domain of men?  Plus, here is a secret…they were often better than the men and never received the credit.  They were lost and laboring as "anonymous" in quilting, needle-point, and other acceptable near domestic arts.   

Labels appropriate to Ms. Stohn could maybe include "rebel" too.  I have written about her life and how she was one of the first women to use "thought and caption" balloons.  That post sorta went mini-viral in the comic book world, being picked up by comic historians and such.  The Comics journal linked to it as well. One day I hope to scan her entire "graphic novel"  From Poverty to Luxary (sic)

I remember respected art scholar and dealer Randall Morris saying something like "Cartoonists have their own school, they aren't outsider artists" and I don't differ with him.  Still there are many standards being applied on the walls of the outsider art fair, and each show will continue the mixed blessing of being labeled as an outsider. 

"I know it when I see it" was used to describe pornography by Justin Potter when ruling in a landmark obscenity case heard by the Supreme Court in 1964. I am pretty sure he threw his hands up when he said it.  "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it..." he said.  We should avoid that esteemed opinion when evaluating outsider art.  

A wonderful group of  "comic books" were one of discoveries at the last Outsider Art Fair.  I'll guess he took some courses too, but it is a guess.  Dan Nadel would be the person to ask. I sure would love to see them, but as I say, I wasn't there. 

(There was another Johnson (real name Ferd or Ferdinand Johnson) working at the same time in Chicago, and he became quite well-known among other cartoonists.  Same fellow? I can't tell…I didn't go go cartoonist school! (joke)  It was certainly not the same fellow,  but neither of them were being "obsessive" about drawing.  They were just doing what comic book artists do.  That would be filling page after page with drawings.  Ask Gary Panter, a great artist who is not an outsider.  He published a massive book containing his sketchbooks.  Read the great essay on Frank, the outsider HERE by Dan Nadel.  There were other great cartoon artists (Basil Wolverton, Windsor McCay for example) and there were plenty of bizarre comic strip artists who were visionaries.  Mr. Nadel knows his stuff…See the magnificent volumes he put together on some HERE. Any library specializing in any art must have these two books.  Like the books displayed at the last outsider art fair, he reveals dozens of quirky and magnificently talented artists, be they self-taught or not.

Ponder on what an outsider artist is, and if the work you are appraising fits some arbitrary non-definition like Justice Steven's frustrated legal opinion of smut, ponder more. Everyone has their own concept. But can we agree, at least, that if one went to art school, he isn't an outsider?  Outsider Art...I know it when I see it.

Other articles in the I'm Not at the Outsider Art Fair series are HERE.  See also two books on Folk art Outsider art by the writer Jim Linderman HERE and HERE.

Art Car ! You can Come in Praying if this van is Swaying Jesus Freak Van

You can Come in Praying if this van is Swaying  Jesus Freak Van circa 1990 original photographs Jim Linderman

Outsider Art African American Yard Show Sculpture Alabama c. 1990 Photographs by Jim Linderman Television in the Driveway

Outsider Art African American Yard Show Sculpture Alabama c. 1990 Photographs by Jim Linderman Television in the Driveway high atop a pole.  See also the BOOK and EBOOK by Jim Linderman In-Situ: American Folk and Outsider Art in Place available HERE.

Hypergraphia

Hypergraphia is a disorder in which a compulsive need to write text takes over a person.  It appears this fellow has filled a cart with his writings, and is on his way to deliver them to Rome.

Collection Jim Linderman

B E RIDDICK Bizarre African-American Outsider Art of the 1970s

B E RIDDICK Bizarre African-American Outsider Art of the 1970s.
Marker on Flattened Shopping Bags.  Virginia.

Annual Outsider Art Fair Post 2017. Hawkins Bolden Garden of African-American Outsider Art Sculpture

Mr. Bolden's make-do scarecrows have attracted attention from collectors (and some scholars) for many years now…but you don't really need a scarecrow unless you have a garden. If you ever wondered what a blind man's garden might look like, this is it.  Years had passed since he laid it out and surrounded it with muscular figures, somehow, from his mind's eye.  The only eyes Bolden had were taken from him as a child while playing in Memphis, TN.

Like the figures for which Bolden has become known, the garden is tactile as much as visual…and each piece was placed by the artist.  Don't expect any precise lines. This garden was laid out by hand, not sight or surveyor…and by an artist feeling for proper placement with his hands alone. No taut line of string and chalk to follow. As such, Mr. Bolden's garden has more than a little in common with the abstract and varying panels of an African-American improvisational quilt.  Seen from above, it might have appeared  to be a quilt made from scraps, but in rusted steel.

Quilts from Signs and Symbols: African Images in African-American Quilts - Maude Southwell Wahlman, Penguin: 1993.  Sourced HERE

But is it imbued with more? Hawkins Bolden (and his sister) were born on the same day  in 1914.  Why is this relevant?  It places his youth only a lifetime from the Civil War and 50 years before the Civil Rights Act.  Scholars of African-American art might think it possible he retained deep-rooted African esthetics and meaning, blind or not.  Subconscious or not. Historical, psychological and tenacious attempts to hold on to traditions left behind.

Can a blind man play the blues? Yes…if he has them.

Or is it no deeper than a man wanting to make something he could.  Not black, not white, but simply an anomaly?  Are the figures "art" only when recognized as such by collectors and removed from the original environment and presented on a white wall?

His own explanations for the scarecrows were tossed off and lighthearted…but then would Mr. Bolden have learned decades before that African-American men were taught to avoid boasting by the dominant white culture? Did he learn to dismiss his art with humor and deflection as a survival technique?  He lived in a state which did not even allow interracial marriage until 1967.  A state which begrudgingly gave in but still retains the law on their books.

How can one ask an artist who has never seen his own work what it means?

Note the rudimentary stakes.  Each has some shape or form which makes it more than a simple pole.  Old handles, nozzles and angular forms of industrial purpose.  Salvage and scrap, but made to live again.  Several of Mr. Bolden's masks and figures line the area.  One piece consists of the discarded base to an electric fan. It has been given eyes and a long, soggy tongue (or beard?) made of carpet. Imagine that…a sculpture given eyes by a blind man.  A larger piece on the other side of the property hangs adorned with rags for straw hair.

At  the 2016 Outsider Art Fair, the SHRINE GALLERY created an installation recreating the garden.  Photo Credit Claire Voon for Hyperallergic used with permission.

It is fraught…or even indulgent to speculate about Mr. Bolden's sculpture.  Who are we to understand this place while only we can see? It took a fairly sophisticated sighted person to appreciate the work while wandering home from a tavern.  I hesitate to use "saved" as the original environment is gone…but wide open (if bleary) eyes recognized this place was profound. Mr. Bolden leaves us with instruction to see clearly but that sometimes mystery  and wonder is all we can know..  Even a glance is precious and a gift we should not take for granted.

Dull Tool Dim Bulb runs an annual post relevant to the Outsider Art Fair.  Previous posts over the years include Sister Gertrude Morgan, Basil Merrett,  Nyla Thompson, Asa Moore, Justin McCarthy and more…search for "outsider art" in the blog's search box.

See also Claire Voon review of the 2016 Outsider Art Fair HERE Shrine Gallery is HERE
See also the film MAKE by Malcom Hearn which shows the artist at work.  Available HERE
William Arnett article on Hawkins Bolden HERE at the Souls Grown Deep site.
Hawkins Bolden Environment photos by Jim Linderman 1994. Books and ebooks by the author on folk art and photography HERE

Victor Joseph Gatto Outsider Artist "The American Primitive" Painting of a Young Woman

"Most of Gatto's paintings—scenes of everyday life in New York, exotic cultures, historical events, and tropical episodes —are packed with endless detail built up with many layers of minute brushstrokes. Gatto, a bachelor and a former featherweight boxer, lived with his widowed stepmother in the section of New York known as "Little Italy." Painters Elaine and Willem De Kooning lived in the next apartment in the late 1930s, and Elaine De Kooning and other artists encouraged Gatto's painting. His work received critical acclaim through several exhibitions in New York galleries during the 1940s and 1950s, his most productive period."  Lynda Roscoe Hartigan Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990)

Oil on Board c. 1950 Collection Jim Linderman

Gatto in the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Gatto papers at Syracuse University  

The Art and Times of Victor Joseph Gatto in the Clarion 1988
Text in full begins on page 58 HERE

THE American Painter Justin McCarthy Annual I am not at the Outsider Art Fair Paris 2016 post

 

Justin McCarthy untitled Collection Jim Linderman

Justin McCarthy Nude circa 1965 Collection Jim Linderman

 

Justin McCarthy "The Last Supper" private collection Slotin Folk Art Auction

 

Justin McCarthy "Yankees Stadium" Private Collection

Justin McCarthy "Goodyear Blimp" Private Collection

"He didn't know he was painting quirky.  He thought he was painting straight."  So said Justin McCarthy's major benefactor the painter Sterling Strauser.  "People often found it difficult to believe that he was a self-taught naïve, because…some of his things look like Emil Nolde, some look like Milton Avery – people that he was not aware of at all. They look like Ernst Kirchner. Some of his watercolors look like Demuth. This is all purely accidental.”  Nancy Green Karlins (who wrote her PHD dissertation on McCarthy) writes: “McCarthy’s intense line, non-naturalistic color and exaggerated drawing are more characteristic of German Expressionism than of most eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American folk art…"

Art scholars have to explain the work of Justin McCarthy by placing him in context with other better known (and better trained) artists.  How else to discuss him?  There IS no appropriate context.  A little of this, a little of that, but really all one of a kind.  Once you have seen a few of his works, you will recognize them but you might not understand them.  Sterling Strauser (actually his wife Dorothy) saw them first sprawled on the grass in a Pennsylvania Town Square.  He recalled thinking how much he would like to see one of them in a frame.  They were priced high, as McCarthy knew he wasn't going to sell any, so why not?   He was a completely self-taught naive recluse who lived most of his long life in a depreciating mansion in Weatherly, PA. 

That is, when he wasn't in a mental institution. Sterling Strauser once told me "McCarthy cured himself through painting." Certainly he had the persistence and gumption to do it.  Evidence of his earliest work here shows it.

The earliest dates to 1915, while he was confined.  A primitive form only, in crayon, from a rudimentary sketchbook he created by gluing individual pages of drawings onto those already in a printed book.  "A Gibson Girl" is a purple shadow showing little or none of his promise.  It wasn't long until he progressed to the formal "Miss Moran" shown following from Galerie Bonheur.

Justin McCarthy "A Gibson Girl from the Follies" circa 1915 - 1920 Collection Jim Linderman

Justin McCarthy "Miss Moran" circa 1920 Galerie Bonheur

 

Justin McCarthy Private Collection

McCarthy came a wealthy family, but one with tragedy.  His father and brother died early and the young man's breakdown followed.  He tried to follow in his father's footsteps.  He tried law school but failed. There was some work over the years, including some time in the Pennsylvania Steel yards which resulted in a spectacular painting full of heat and smoke. 

Justin McCarthy Bethlehem Steel Private Collection

His brother was favored growing up and young Justin was shy. One pleasant and persistent memory had to have been the visit he had to the Louvre in Paris.  Only the wealthy could afford a trip to Paris at that time, and they went.  He was apparently left alone in the museum, and it stuck.

As his early, primitive institutionalized drawings developed he signed them with pseudonyms but often didn't sign them at all.  
After some five years, he was allowed back home to the mansion his father had owned and remained there most of his life.  During this time(though no one but his mother had seen the work) he filled the house with astounding vibrant quick explosions of color. He was a prolific and fearless artist. The Great American artist. Nothing escaped his eye and he would paint anything. Eventually even the unused stove and the bathtub were filled with paintings.  Strauser describes piles of work in every room.

Justin McCarthy Private Collection

Justin McCarthy Private Collection

Justin McCarthy Private Collection

Justin McCarthy Private Collection

They are both absurd and beautiful. Sports figures drawn while watching television and filled with color later. Some from life but imbued with his own.The pages of National Geographic Magazine. Some remembered from the early motion picture projector his wealthy father had at the mansion.  Gallerist and curator Randall Morris once described McCarthy as having a "cinematic style" which may have developed as he was a young boy watching flickering images.  His quick "wet on wet" working technique may have been an attempt to capture them. It was a practice he continued his entire artistic life. I believe he succeeded. 

A range of works drawn from the web give some indication to his unusual style and complete mastery of color.  The artist created work from 1915 up to his death in 1977.
 
See Also:   
Gene Epstein "What Kind of Art is This?" Folk Art Magazine Winter 1992 Pages 51

American Folk Art Museum McCarthy collection
 
Nancy Green Karlins "Justin McCarthy" 1891-1977 The Making of a 20th Century Self Taught Painter Dissertation Ph. D. New York University 1986

Randall Morris "The Cinematic "I" : Justin McCarthy 1984 Noyes Museum

Early sketchbooks and memories of Sterling Strauser are in the collection of the Archives of American Art Smithsonian Museum of Art 

See also two books on Folk art Outsider art by the writer Jim Linderman HERE and HERE.
A few other posts in my unstructured and informal Outsider Art series are shown HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE   More or less.  Additional works by Basil Merrett are HERE.