Category: Outsider Art
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Giuseppe Arcimboldo
According to a saying that became popular in the 1960’s, you are what you eat. Perhaps not as directly as in the marvelous and bizarre portrait heads created by 16th Century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo out of arrangements of fruit, vegetables, tree roots, fish, birds and other natural forms, but a sobering thought nonetheless as most…
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Gilles Tréhin (update)
In 2006 I wrote about autistic savant Gilles Tréhin and Urville, a large and fantastically detailed city that he has been creating in mind since the age of 12, and shares with us by way of hundreds of intricate drawings. I recently learned that shortly after I wrote that post, Tréhin’s English language book about…
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Ah Pook is Here
Ah Pook is Here (originally Ah Puch is Here) is a collaborative graphic narrative by writer William S. Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill. I was tempted to say “experimental graphic narrative”, but using the word “experimental” and the name William S. Burroughs in the same sentence is redundant. Named for Ah Puch, the Mayan Death…
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Exquisite Corpse
When I was in grade school my friends and I, particularly those of us who considered ourselves “artists”, played a game with no name; in which we would fold an elongated piece of paper in thirds or quarters, and take turns drawing parts of a figure. The first participant would usually start by drawing a…
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Michael Brown
Michael Brown is an artist about whom I can find little information. I came across his work on the web site for Gallery Nucleus. He indulges in some delightful weirdness involving vaguely bunny-like things holding matches, sinister looking rabbits and birds with human eyes, and, in particular, beautifully colored translucent imaginary undersea invertebrates, floating languidly…
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Illusionistic 3-D painting on sidewalks and walls
I’ve written before about the illusionistic 3-D sidewalk “paintings” in chalk by artists like Kurt Wenner and Julian Beever, as well as the large scale illusionistic murals by Eric Grohe. Web Urbanist has posted a nice overview, Amazing 3D Art from the Best Street Artists, with a selection of work by Wenner (image above), Beever,…