1970, France -

David Braillon has been always fascinated by the goods trains. As he, in contrast to the rest of the family, could not work for the French railways (SNCF), he projected his passion in his drawings. He has drawn locomotives and wagons by color pencils, with the help of a ruler, on graph paper. Worried about the right order of the goods wagons, he spreads them horizontally, sometimes on several sheets that can reach a few meters, and vertically, in three or four layers.

via abcd gallery.

They are all three still awesome, that’s all I am saying.

I watched the Daniel Johnston documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston the same evening I watched the documentary about the iconic Henry Darger In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger. Those links will take you to the documentary trailers.

For me, it was a phenomenal night of documentary film. Consequently, the two men are inextricably linked in my mind. So now I am linking them in this post.

Darger lived as an unassuming janitor in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. When he died, a massive literary and artistic body of work was found by Darger’s landlord. The art world peed itself.

Read more about Darger. Below, his infamous heroines, the Vivian sisters.

1899, Castellon (Spain) - 1969, Moûtiers (France)

Coming from a poor family of nine children, Anselme was unable to attend school. At the age of eighteen, he moved to France. Using the name of Anselme Bois, he worked in a factory, on a farm and in the mines. He worked relentlessly for “forty-eight hours a day,” as he liked to say. In 1926, he was able to realize his dream, acquiring a fruit and vegetable shop on the main street in Moûtiers. His commercial success did not, however, let him forget from where he came.

In order to fulfill his long time desire, he resolved to draft a “peace plan,” describing how to make the world a better place and solve all the problems of the planet. The first edition of his manifest L’Union Mondiale - l’avenir du monde came out on April 3rd, 1956. He sent a copy of the manuscript to General de Gaulle, the Queen of England, the Pope… March 16th, 1957 : the first conference on his “Plan mondial.” His fellow citizens, however, were making fun of him and Anselme was terribly hurt by the lack of response to his writings. 1962 was a difficult year for him : his wife died and Anselme decided to pass his shop over to one of his sons.

In turn, his son Michel encouraged him to paint, remembering that his father used to scribble drawings on the back of his store invoices. Anselme Boix-Vives found refuge in his invented utopia and began a new life devoted to painting. During seven intense years (from July 1962 to July 1969), he created more than two thousand paintings : gouaches, oils (also Ripolin oils), drawings. In these seven years, he was surrounded by kings, chaplains, lunar beings, heroes of the 20th century like Kennedy or Martin Luther King, and TV commentators, like Catherine Langeais, but also regular people (his series of “concierges”), scenes from every day life (weddings), actors (Michel Simon), current events (The March on Washington) and biblical scenes (The Deposition). Anselme’s paintings are snapshots of our times, taken from the middle of a flamboyant jungle.

via abcd gallery

1937, Vienna (Austria) -

“During his adolescence, Johann Korec worked on a farm and as a shepherd. His dream, however, was to care for animals in a circus. When he was twenty-one, he entered the hospital of Gugging and since then he has been living in the House of the Artists. There, he has started drawing and developed his personal technique : he collects pictures from magazines, traces them, sometimes re-using the same image for one drawing. He then decides on the sex of his figures. Korec developed a truly erotic art ; coupling is the central theme of his story. His work is also centered on writing. We can no longer separate his writings and drawings. The texts are not an explanation of the drawings but an intricate part of the work itself.”

via abcd.

This is the third post I have done of late on outsider art, aka: amateur art, self taught art, art brut, etc. Basically, those terms refer to artwork produced by people without artistic training and outside the confines or expectations of the art world. Of particular interest to me is the work of the mentally ill or ‘retarded.’

Through the history of art by the mentally ill and ‘retarded’ are heartbreaking biographies of people who turned to art as a balm for lives that can only be called tragic. The idea of heartfelt, beautiful images like those below coming out of a soul crushing place like an institution is both disturbing and uplifting. Much of their work is forgotten or lost. The images and biographies that do survive are, in my opinion, worth a look.  Below is certainly not the saddest story I read, but this is a family blog.

1924, Mologa (Russia) - 2003, Afonino (Russia)

“Following meningitis at the age of seven years, Alexander Lobanov became deaf-and-mute. Rebellious and frequently aggressive, his family had him confined to a mental hospital when he was twenty-three. During the first years of hospitalization, he was often agitated and violent, but finally accepted his fate and withdrew into himself. At the age of thirty, he began drawing : with Chinese ink, pencil, colour pencils and later on also felt-tip pens.

In the beginning he never showed his drawings. Once they were finished, he put them in a small suitcase that he never left. In the seventies Lobanov became passionate about photographs. For his photographic portraits he would stage himself, creating his own environment constituted by firearms and guns from cardboard paper, but also drawings and ornamental symbols originally used by the communist propaganda. Lobanov’s artistic production consists of several thousands of drawings.”

images and bio via abcd.

“Charles A. A. Dellschau (1830-1923), a butcher from Texas whose obsession with flight yielded notebooks of double-sided watercolors that have the luminosity of stained glass.” ROBERT A. SMITH

“…what is still fascinating about some of the best outsider art is the feeling you have that fantasy has become so powerful as to eclipse what most people take for reality. Charles A. A. Dellschau, a butcher in Texas, created thousands of wonderfully fanciful pictures of Jules Verne-style flying machines.” KEN JOHNSON