alcippe | Entries tagged with inspiration

20120416101300_dasha_shishkin_What_Does_it_Matter_ToHer...

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These paintings by Jean Fouquet are from circa 1454:

The story of Henry Darger is a fascinating one. He spent his entire life living like a hermit, made just enough money to get by via a janitorial job at a nearby hospital, and was considered completely unremarkable by neighbors and those around him. No one really noticed him and he liked to keep it that way.

He died in 1973, and when the landlord went in to clean out Henry's apartment it was discovered that he had created massive books containing thousands of paintings of a strange, beautiful, fantasy world unlike anything anyone had ever seen.

Art experts were called in to deal with the situation, and the rest is history. Henry Darger's works are now known world wide. He was a Chicagoan (lived in Lincoln Park), and I happen to know one of the experts who was called in when the books were first discovered. She says that some of them were so large they had to take them apart to get them out of the tiny one-room apartment.

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Also, here is a wonderful documentary on Henry Darger and his work*, I highly recommend it if you have any interest in learning more about this amazing artist.

Additional information on him is also here.

*For those of you outside the U.S who want to watch this I recommend using Hotspot Shield to hide your IP (it's free).

I recently saw a documentary about the artist Francesca Woodman, an artist who commit suicide in 1981 at the age of 22, but left behind a huge body of work that was ahead of its time.

During her short life she never achieved any success, which was a contributing factor to her depression and suicide. I wonder how her work was suddenly embraced by galleries, collectors, institutions, after her death. It makes me sad that people weren't able to appreciate her work until after she was gone. Why couldn't she have been recognized for the genius she was while still alive? There's got to be a decent biography out there I can read.

I found an article that expresses this same frustration here, and think this quote sums it up fairly well:

"it has historically been too easy to praise what is dead and too difficult to nurture what lives, and she is a problem because she is a martyr and ours is a culture addicted to martyrs and martyrology."

Here's the documentary, in case you'd like to watch (it's in English but has Spanish subtitles):

Reed and Rader

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Tal R

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David Reed

I find David Reed's work fascinating because no one can really figure out how he creates his paintings. They look photographic, but they're not. And the surfaces are significantly sanded down, but that's about all anyone can gather. Looking at his work and trying to imagine his process is what lead me (in part) to experiment and develop the techniques I use in my own paintings.