Photo-essay: A self-taught art

Aloïse Corbaz was institutionalized in 1918 for schizophrenia; two years later, she made her first drawings. Corbaz utilized what was available to her in the confined setting and enriched her colorful works with an assortment of found materials, such as paper packaging, magazine pages, and yarn; as well as toothpaste and the juice pressed from flower petals. With these humble materials she created a fanciful world inhabited by kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses.

Nenuphars/Paix Christi translates into “Waterlillies/Peace Christ.” The double-sided work is composed of three ?paper sheets stitched together to increase its scale. Lush and romantic flowers, leaves, and other decorative motifs crowd embracing couples. Figures and flowers are so closely intertwined they morph into one entity. On one side of this work, a woman is lifted off her feet to reach her joyous lover’s lips and, while a substantial figure, appears to float upward off the page. Her décolleté of roses was applied with a stain of geranium-flower juice.

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein worked as a florist and a baker before devoting the last forty years of his life to making art. The son of a sign painter and stepson of a Sunday painter who believed in reincarnation, Von Bruenchenhein was exposed to creative trades and nonconformist ideas from an early age. It was a fortunate foundation for an artist who eventually found his voice in a wide range of expressions: poetry, photography, painting, ceramics, and sculpture. “Create and be recognized” commanded a sign hanging in the artist’s basement studio, and he attempted to do just that: his home was utterly transformed by his unrelenting outpouring of expression.

New Zealand artist Martin Thompson uses graph paper and ball-point pens to draw perfectly designed diptychs that are as exacting in execution as they are mesmerizing in design. Thompson’s other tools are a handsaw (used as a straightedge), a small scalpel, and Scotch tape. A self-taught artist and a mathematician, he explores the visual patterns of mathematical rhythms and sequences; each of the markings in his works relates to a mathematical equation, and each formula is based on multiples of ten. After memorizing a formula or sequence, he develops a hard-edged pattern on a line of squares on graph paper scaled in millimeters and then creates a mirror image using the sequence in the opposite manner on a second sheet of graph paper.

Highly prolific, Purvis Young has filled his vast studio in a warehouse building with stacks of artworks, all covered with his trademark motifs— writhing crowds of people with arms upraised, powerful horses, commanding pregnant women, armies of trucks, and clusters of city buildings. A short stint in prison opened up the world of art to Young. While serving time for armed robbery, he studied the mural-painting tradition, particularly urban murals from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Chicago’s Wall of Respect. He also admired canonized masters, including El Greco, Rembrandt, and van Gogh. The artist distills all of these influences into his paintings, assemblages, and books. His quick, gestural lines and washes of color show that Young works rapidly and in an assured manner.

In 1950, Eugene Andolsek started a ritual of nightly drawing sessions at the kitchen table in the home he shared with his mother. Using graph paper, he would begin each composition by applying black outlines—what Andolsek called the “designs”—with a straightedge and a compass and then fill them in with color. The artist described his process as methodical and orderly but also trancelike, in that the drawings just “came out” of him. He sometimes did not even remember putting stylus to paper. His recollection of?“waking up sometimes and a drawing were there and I didn’t even know how it got there” points to the transcendent, meditative quality artmaking can be for the artist.