Henry Darger (1892-1973) is usually one of the first artists mentioned when what is known as Outsider Art is brought up. Outsider art, also known as art brut, is art produced by people with no formal training in art, and no connection to the art world. The result is usually visually jarring, particularly to people who are ensconced within the institutionalized art world, and intensely personal, often having a narrative and symbolic system all its own.
Darger was born in Chicago, and his early life was characterized by hardship and loss. His parents had both died by 1905, and he lived for the rest of his adolescence in Catholic boys' homes and institutions, where he faced what they would have called "treatment" or "discipline" in those days, and what we would call "horrible child abuse" today. Modern research shows that Darger may have had Asperger's Syndrome, which in his time was unfortunately not recognized as it is today. In his later life, he lived in the same apartment in Chicago for over 40 years, until his death, working menial labor in a Catholic hospital until about ten years before his death, and attending Catholic Mass regularly. He was, in his own way, deeply concerned with the wellfare of children, and his work reflects this. Darger and his one close friend, William Shloder, discussed founding a "Children's Protective Society," which would adopt out orphans to loving families, but this never came to fruition.
After his death in 1973, Darger's landlords found his life's work in his apartment. It's a book, fully illustrated, called The Realms of the Unreal, and covers several storylines, totaling at 15 volumes and 15,145 pages. To put it in an extremely simplified way, it tells the stories of an alternate world in which children, namely the inspirational Vivian Girls, the victims of child labor, rise up against a draconian regime to restore peace and harmony. He provided two endings, one with the Vivian Girls triumphing and one with the Vivian Girls in defeat. He also wrote an autobiography (5,084 pages--comparatively light reading), another, unfinished piece of fiction that weighs in at over 10,000 pages, and kept a daily weather journal.
To create his images, Darger traced images found in newspapers, magazines and ads, sometimes multiple times in one scene, as seen in the top image, and he also frequently used collage, collecting old periodicals for source material. He seemed to like the Coppertone Girl in particular. He worked with watercolors, and seemed to have a natural talent for it. His scenes are typically large and epic, and feature little girls engaged in full warfare with grown men. His work can be disturbingly violent, too, showing the terrible tortures inflicted upon the girls by the evil villains. It's interesting to note that Darger focused on girls rather than boys, and even more interesting to note that though the child characters are ostensibly female, some of them have male genitalia.
I personally love Darger's work. I love its raw psychology and the fact that Darger was not interested in academic art, but was making art for himself and only himself. There's something nice about that, and refreshing. And Darger seems like a real sweetheart, too. Caravaggio, for instance, is one of my favorite artists, but he was probably a real asshole. And everyone knows how misogynistic Picasso was. Darger, on the other hand, stuck up for the children, saying that each one had a right "to play, to be happy, and to dream, the right to normal sleep of the night's season, the right to an education, that we may have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and heart."
I mentioned in an earlier post graphic novels/comics and I are not friends. We just aren't. Despite this fact, many people have told me that, since I like to make art and I like to write, that I should make graphic novels. My answer: No. This answer is usually followed by whining by the other person about how I should, and how they're so cool and lucrative, and how I should try because they would TOTALLY read it. My answer: No.
For one thing, I can never successfully write and draw/paint at the same time. I've been on an art-making kick for over a year, which means I haven't done any passable writing in all that time. (I should note that by "writing" I am referring to fiction. My writing form is novel-length fiction. Blogging and nonfiction writing I can always do, and I'm not counting it in this discussion.) To me, they are both forms of storytelling, but through different media, and it's hard for me to combine the two in a successful way.
I've also said before that I don't like using text with images. Illustration is one thing, but I don't like text actually in the image. Sometimes it works, but, like paint drips, it usually ends up looking rather stupid and forced when used in a serious way. Things like editorial cartoons are something else entirely. The top image is the only piece I've ever done where the text doesn't offend me. It's part of a larger body of images, none as successful as this one. It's watercolor and pen on paper, 9 X 12 inches.
However, I also really like art books and bookmaking. I only have one semi-completed book to date, which is bound but not filled in with pictures all the way. I've been painting pages for another small book, in the "medieval" style, inspired by medieval gospel books. It kind of tells a story but since it has no words it's very open to interpretation when it comes to what exactly happens in that story (spoiler: there are sexytimes). This interpretive narrative is the one that comes most naturally to me when working within the format of storytelling. The pages seen here are the first (center) and fourth (bottom) pages of the eight-page book, the only ones that are totally complete. They are about 4.5 X 6 inches, and are ink, watercolor and gouache on paper. And it's a dude. I'm also planning a fancy, possibly gilt cover it. Of course, mine will be bookboard and gold leaf (if I feel like buying it) and not gems and ivory.
I do, however, like reading graphic novels (the good ones, anyway), and I can recommend the following: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Kimmie66 by Aaron Alexovich (which was part of the now-defunct and totally awesome Minx imprint of DC), and American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. These are all people who can do comics and do them extremely well. I am not one of them.
...I mean, why wouldn't you? They're always smiling! I'm tentatively calling this painting The View, but as that's the name of a fairly odious daytime talkshow, I'm not sure if I can commit to it. Hopefully something better will come to me, but for now, that's it's name. Actually, though, in speech I rarely call any of my paintings by name, and would refer to this one as "that one with the skullheads and the red floaty trees." Something about calling my paintings by name in a conversational setting seems pretentious to me.
My camera, in other news, is working when it feels like it, and thankfully felt like it for the shooting of this painting. My current hypothesis? Gnomes.
Back from the madness that is the holiday season, I've finally completed some more large paintings. Also, my broken camera decided it was tired of being a drama queen and now works again. I hope this is foreshadowing of the rest of my encounters with technology--that if they break I can just ignore them for a while and they'll fix themselves without requiring effort or money on my part.
Actually, more than likely, my luck with technology has all been spent up and my next blog post will be scanned in at the public library after I had to write it on a typewriter.
So! Onto the artwork. The two seen here are additions to the Home collection, and are finally finished after much deliberation. On top we have The Storm Gatherers. This is one of the rare instances when I've made up an image to go with a title, rather than the other way around. The title comes from a Henry Darger piece, which is actually titled A Storm Gathers but, like I often do, I read it wrong and thought it said something cooler. The end result is this painting, 44 X 46 inches and about three thousand pounds of stand oil glazes. It features a theme I've been liking lately, which is an organized group of small girls, who seem unassuming but who are probably up to something nefarious, in this case, summoning a storm with the help of lightning rods, weather vanes and a barometer. A similar clutch of these girls can be seen in The Harvest. Most of the girls are based on photographs of me when I was little, and the outfits are actual clothes I've owned, namely ballet recital costumes and summer dresses. Stylistically, this painting echoes The Discovery of a False Moon in its glazy, open field-setting.
Then there is Outlands, whose bizarre size (8 X 18 inches) was dictated by the size of the fabric on which it is painted. This fabric was not purchased, but rather came from an old skirt of my mother's, so I didn't have the luxury of choosing a reasonable size. I wanted to do this painting for a long time, but couldn't find small enough stretchers until recently. Also, although I like the way it came out, I don't recommend painting on old fabric; it gets fuzzy and when gessoed (gesso'd?) the fuzziness ends up as stiff lumps and detail work is very difficult. There is also a hole in the fabric, which is hard to see but obviously not ideal, and overall the fabric is worn and not as structurally sound as new fabric. But I still like it. The figures are taken from photographs of my mother (in the white shirt, center) and some friends from her Brownie troop on a field trip in the early '60s. Like the ones used in the Huntington paintings, the photos are kind of weird and don't have a feeling of being in a specific place.
In keeping with the season, I've decided to share some images of both the bounty and the desolation of autumn. Or something. Top: The Harvest, 40X42 in. Bottom, 10X10 in, untitled as of now. I've always liked the fall--I find it refreshing after the summer, like a new beginning, clearing away the old brush and the humidity of the past year. To say that these were made in the fall, though, would not be entirely accurate--the untitled one was made over the summer. I have four other 10X10 canvases that have, over the years, experienced many incarnations. The latest have been these, in the "medieval" style (note humpy black body-masses), with lots of stand oil. I work on these rather casually, usually when I'm done with a larger project and need something to do with excess paint (which is really expensive and so throwing it out is an option I try to avoid). The one you see here is the only one I consider to be complete.
The Harvest is the latest member of the Home family, done on patterned fabric with collage elements. I think it's most similar to The Homestead stylistically, and I've used the same photographs. Like The Homestead, the idea is an ending, or a transition from one phase to another, but the past remains present (in both senses of the word) in the physical features of the place. The mood, obviously, is slightly different; lately I've preferred larger groups of figures to just one. I've been interested in the idea of a cultish little group, something like these skullhoodies, a united force.
Plus they have cake.
Here are some drawings I did sometime in the spring. They are all about 5 in. X 7 in., ink (pen) on paper. Extremely. Meticulously. Rendered. I don't know how long these tiny things took me. I mainly worked on them during downtime at the old coffee shop. Which gives you an idea of how business went there.
All three are based on real places, and are in effect an iteration of my current interest in landscapes and memory as place. This is, in effect, how I remember those places. Certain features remain prominent, or are made more prominent, and others have been erased entirely. I wasn't interested in recreating a realistic record of the place (though, when I compare these to the images in my little head, they could be considered accurate renderings. Don't make fun of my brain.), or an image that would be instantly recognizable to others. I was more interested in capturing the feeling of the place. That is not to say, however, that these are entirely impulsive pieces; the images as I see them in my head have quite bright colors, but I left them out of the drawings for the sake of the compositions, since color would overwhelm the delicacy of the lines.
Hopefully I'll be able to post some actual paintings sometime soon. They just take so long.
I've always--well, since college, anyway--liked Lisa Yuskavage (say it yus-CAH-vitch). Something about the lurid colors and the obvious porniness of them appeal to me. She has been described, in the introduction to her Small Paintings book, written by director Tamara Jenkins, as "one of those 'bad girl' painters." It's kind of a simplistic title to be sure, but there is a rebellious quality that I like about her work. It's the pastel colors, I think, all those awful, seventies-porno ki
nds of turquoises and peaches and pinks, the twisting of the classical nude into a twentieth-century pinup, and the willful distortion, bordering on the perverse, of the female form; they're not even like human beings after a point, they're like these strange, alien female creatures borne out of some subconscious childhood sexual fantasy. That sounds pretty pervy, doesn't it? But, come on, look at Wrist Corsage's butt. Her work walks several fine lines, between cute and frightening, between high and low art, between sexual and psychological, between exploitative and celebratory.
To create these girlie creatures, Yuskavage first created small ceramic figurines called maquettes so she could study the movement of light over the human(ish) form. Everything I attempt to make out of clay ends up looking like a tumor, so I find this incredibly impressive. I've also been a longtime fan of the study of beauty and sexuality in the female form, particularly when it's studied by a female, and goes into the darker, more uncomfortable aspects of it. And maybe the most important reason I like Lisa? She's fun. Her paintings make me smile. And maybe that's what ultimately counts.
Top to bottom: Couch, 1997-98; The Smoker, 2007; Fleshpot; Wrist Corsage, 1996; Redhead, Blonde and Brunette, 1995.
