Behind Picture Frames

My older sister recently gave me a print of a renaissance man lounging in a messy house smoking a pipe. Below was written, "When a man is single he lives at his ease"

I enjoyed this gift immensely. Weeks went by and the picture fell, the glass cracked and upon repair a multitude of documents were discovered behind the frame. Little did I know, but the picture was given to her by an ex boyfriend long ago and she had placed all the love letters/break up letters, notes, journal entries, and other pictures ( a shirtless man next to a homemade still in Craig Co. a foot or two from a small grazing fawn) all hidden behind the frame.

I found this remarkable and want to hide secrets behind all of my artwork for others to find or never find...hidden treasures of trash, handmade maps, miniature photographs, and little handwritten stories.

Gloria Vilches: Mis Collages

http://gloriavilches.blogspot.com/

When viewing Vilches' works I am reminded of my own collages from alternative processes. Her works are simple yet they resonate with symbolism and meaning and are visually stimulating. She also enjoys using text/words in the same fashion as I do; simple incomplete sentences. I think these works leave room for personal interpretation. I also love her use of antiquated papers, images, photographs, and materials because its as if the works become artifacts that now transcend time.

Vilches has a blog on blogspot. I, however, cannot find any personal information about her, other than her facebook, and cannot read her blog for it is all en espanol. Check her work out!

Joseph Elmer Yoakum

Joseph Elmer Yoakum (February 20, 1890-December 25, 1972) was a self-taught artist of African-American and Native American descent who drew landscapes in a unique and highly individual style. He was 76 when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes, and he produced over 2000 drawings during the last decade of his life. His work is a prime example of outsider art.

Whitney Halstead of the Art Institute of Chicago was the greatest promoter of Yoakum's work during his lifetime. He believed that his story was "more invention than reality... in part myth, Yoakum's life as he would have wished to have lived it." (Depasse 2001, p. 3)

His official records state that he was born in Missouri, but Yoakum always claimed to have been born in 1888 in Arizona as a Navajo Indian. (Proud of his invented heritage, he used to pronounce "Navajo" as "Na-va-JOE.") His father was a Cherokee Indian and his mother a former slave of Cherokee, French-American, and African-American descent, but their son was always most fascinated by his Native American heritage.

When he was nine, Yoakum left home to join the Great Wallace Circus. He traveled the country, and even the world, as a billposter with five different circuses including Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and the Ringling Brothers.

He returned to Missouri in 1908 and devoted himself to a family, having his first son with Myrtle Julian in 1909 and marrying her in 1910. He was drafted into the army in 1918, where he worked repairing roads and railroads as a member of the 805th Pioneer Infantry.

Yoakum never returned to his family after the war, choosing instead to travel around the United States working at odd jobs. He eventually remarried and settled down in Chicago, where he was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1946. He soon left, and was drawing on a regular basis by the early 1950s.

He was discovered by the mainstream art community in 1967 by John Hopgood, an instructor at the Chicago State College who saw Yoakum's work hanging in his studio window and purchased twenty-two pictures on the spot. A group of students and teachers at the Art Institute of Chicago, including Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, took a primary interest in his work, promoting him so well that he was given a one-man show at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1972, just a month before he died.

Although he started drawing as a way to capture his memories of places like Green Valley Ashville Kentucky, he shifted towards imaginary landscapes from places he had never been, places like Mt Mowbullan in Dividing Range near Brisbane Australia and Mt Cloubelle of West India. He drew freehand with ballpoint pen, rarely having to make corrections, and colored his drawings with watercolors and pastels. He always used two lines to delineate land masses and is known for his sinuous lines and organic forms.

The autobiographical works, such as This is the flooding of Sock River through Ash Grove Mo on July 4, 1914 in that drove many persons from Homes I were with the Groupe leiving their homes for safety (sic), come from a four month period at the end of his life and are marked by a shift towards pure abstraction. WIKIPEDIA-Joseph Yoakum

Joseph Yoakum is one of my new favorite artists. He is considered an outsider artist and it is his life's story that interests me more than his artworks. I love the landscape and Yoakum draws these landscapes from his memories, which has been a minor focus of my work, in an abstracted way. His life and memories have become mythic because of the contradiction in facts and Yoakum drew imagined landscapes that he had never seen. Yoakum was an inventive storyteller and he reminds me of my father..if my father were a super cool half crazy artist...

Clarifying Outsider Art

"The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut (French: [aʁ bʁyt], "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.^[1]

While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term "outsider art" is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or Naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.

Outsider art has emerged as a successful art marketing category (an annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1992). The term is sometimes misapplied as a catch-all marketing label for art created by people outside the mainstream "art world," regardless of their circumstances or the content of their work.

In 1991, the first and only such organization dedicated to the study, exhibition and promotion of outsider art was formed in Chicago: Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.Henry Darger, Joseph Yoakum, Lee Godie, William Dawson, David Philpot, and Wesley Willis. Intuit maintains a non-profit museum, open to the public, which features exhibitions of art by intuitive, outsider, and self taught artists. Chicago is often recognized for its concentration of self taught and outsider artists, among them --" (Wikipedia)

Cole Rise

The images of Cole Rise evoke a surreality or sense of dreaming. His images incorporate beautiful landscapes and his subjects, when present, are always floating above the ground. I am drawn to his work for those two reasons. His landscapes remind me of many photographs I have taken of the landscapes of my home, the Shenandoah. Also his floating subjects reminded me of the series of Images I did sophomore year in Digital 1-The Ecstasy Series. Especially the one of my sister in flight over a dead cornfield with a magnificent sunset.

"Cole Rise has spent the better half of his life taking pleasure behind the lens; stalking cows and lying in the grass to capture the landscape. His work has been featured in a notable amount of international creative magazines, books, billboards, websites, posters, and even a few CD covers for bands you can find in most music stores. He can't tell you how big the universe is, or why we're really here, but his work sometimes flirts with the idea of knowing."

www.colerise.com

By The Late John Brockman, John Brockman, 1969

A collection of quotes, sentences, and paragraphs commenting on Brockman's philosophies of life, nature, man, art, the mind, etc.

In Art&Language with Tom Adair spring 09 smester we learned about Wittgenstein and the importance and power of speech. Learning to choose words is necessary because what is said needs to be what is meant, otherwise one is just making noise. Brockman manages to manifest an entirety into a few sentences. His words are extraordinary in that each page of the book may only contain a sentence or two, yet so much is said. Eloquent prose of the expounded views of John Brockman.

"All these things. All these people. All these places. All this waste, this
garbage: it’s me. There was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but me,
talking to me of me. “When I dream and invent without a backward glance,
am I not . . . Nature?”

"It’s no longer possible to tell a story: life is a story. It’s a story, a narrative
series of pictures. A series of timeless tableaus, an infinitely successive
series of nows. But this can’t be. It isn’t. “A picture held us captive. And we
could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to
repeat it to us inexorably.”* The world is finite: that means “it” isn’t. We are
free from the pictures and the lives lived in the mind are at an end. Words
are what matter."

"No more art, no more artists. Actions, not objects. Ritual, not possessions.
The real artistry is in deciphering the process of neural coding. This
navigation threads the way through the clues strewn around the environment
and sets processes in motion to allow patterns to reveal themselves."

This last quote is a personal mantra for me and my artwork this semster.

You can download the entire book as an HTML from this link
www.edge.org/btljb/btljb.pdf

Iuri Kothe

http://www.iuri.art.br/cv

Iuri Kothe is a Brazilian Artist who works with photographs, photomontages, video, and audio.
He has exhibited work all over the world since 2004 and has also made appearances in magazines, on cd covers, and paper illustrations. He is a working artist who got an Electrical Engineering degree and a M. Sc. in Digital Audio Processing. He is currently working out of Rio de Janeiro and has taught classes to poor children.

"Iuri Kothe dedicates remarkable talent to the art of collage since 2003 – both analog, with pieces of magazine photographs, and digital, with pictures processed on Photoshop.
His images show good precision, aesthetic appeal and high suggestive impact and have attracted the attention of journalists, who see a peculiar form of communication; and other artists, stimulated to bring them to public exhibition."

I enjoy his photomontages because they are simple. His works are very dreamlike and have inspired me to go in a simpler direction. I also ennjoy his works because of Kothe's simple background and that he is appears humble. These works coming from someone down to earth and real make me realize it is possible to be an artist and also lead a normal life. It is attainable.