I have kept a small notebook since 1974. I am on notebook #652. I continue to draw on certain drawings. The oldest is a
portrait of my father which I started in 1963. I worked on it again last month. Several years ago a romance ended badly.
Even though this happened (badly) I decided to continue to Live in Love. I tried to figure out what was needed in order to
do this.
One thing that I seemed to need was a Vehicle of Marriage. It turned out to be a 1997 Volvo sedan. I decorated it and
drove around getting married. I have been married four times since starting on my Wedding Tour. Today, May 21, 2009, my
life, right now, could be understood if you were listening to a country western station.
-David Dunlap
My hope is that this new “non-photo” communicates a sense of loss, a sense of the tenderness with which important
benchmarks in a life are recorded – and, finally, a sense of possibility. The forms communicate a kind of emptiness -- and
yet they also can stand as blank slates on which new futures, new lives can be written.
Executed in watercolor the aquatic life is drawn directly from Anderson’s observation on the Mississippi Gulf coast. They are characterized by brilliant color and attitudinal certainty.
Memory is the source from which Ferdinand Pleines creates his paintings.
His highly personal universe seems collaged together, disorienting, yet at the same time, drawing the viewer
into the composition.
The dress came out of my interest in several aspects of fashion: the distortion of the body, the idea of the second skin
and the creation of a 'look' which acts like a layer or filter to our perception of the woman wearing the garment and
often creates the illusion of glamour.
The mirror creates a colored reflection, which, because of its brightness is faint and allusive and by its color sets a
mood and gives both the reflection and the object a character. Character is another theme that runs through my recent work.
In it's obsessive detail, there is an intense, compressed physicality to this drawing which energizes it. This drawing is
the artist's own restructured universe in which she must live in order to survive and in which she invites the viewer to
live. The architectural scaffolding, the lyric and spiritual energy, the magical letters and numbers, the wit and humor,
signal the intelligence, the metaphysical ordering both of the drawing and Seillé's own universe. It anchors both the art
and the inner life of the artist.
Traylor is now acknowledged as an artist whose works transcend the categorization of folk art, the artistically complex and sublime reflections of an indomitable human spirit. The pieces of cast-off cardboard that Traylor transformed have entered a new phase of what might have been a perilous existence, finally confirming the reputation of an artist whose full life was recorded in his drawings made in the Monroe Street district (Montgomery, AL).
-Margaret Lynne Ausfeld
Exerpted from “A World unto Itself”: Bill Traylor’s Montgomery
Bill Traylor William Edmondson and the Modernist Impulse
Roberta Smith has written recently, “Each delightful, surprising object offers a circuitous commentary of contrasting
forms, colors, materials, and techniques….
Each part of each Newman is a whole unto itself, colluding with but strikingly opposed to the larger unit.”
The block head busts in the left frame strain to see by twisting their short necks, but since they have no eyes to see they
can only sense. They might, in fact, be mere tattoos on a thigh, unveiled by a theatrical curtain. Here they mime and
swivel and serve no purpose other than to embellish the flesh. In the right frame one has broken free of the pack to serve
as a garter snap in a triumph of mock eroticism.
Located in 19th century American expansion and immigration, the characters in this painting represent both optimism and
pessimism in the pursuit of personal fulfillment through a romantic relationship.
Figurative camaraderie could be a new focus for Goldberg’s lexicon.
Lander is a stage, a vehicle of expression with the narrative potential to bear the weight of any metaphor and the
formal strength to prepare us for the task ahead.
This painting was painted over a period of time ranging from 1946 – 1968. When the artist visited the Metropolitan Museum
of Art with her first New York dealer, Nina Howell Starr, and saw large paintings there, she decided she ought to paint a
big picture. Evans went back to her home in North Carolina and painted a big picture, combining several pictures into one
total composition, thus completing a big painting.
The insistence on the drawing as a made thing is palpable. Despite their tight organization, they were composed
improvisationally…. There is something both gameboardlike and maplike in Burleson’s work, with a direct correspondence
between the visual journeys that the drawings invite, through machine workings or mazelike enclosures, and the exploratory,
improvisational nature of the drawings’ invention. The drawings go where Burleson is compelled to let them go, and he is
experiencing these places as he draws them.
-Nathan Kernan
Exerpted from "Outside-In: The Drawings of Thomas Burleson"
The Sienese Shredder 2009
This painting depicts the mythological events of Napurrula’s ancestors. Her artworks focus on the travels of her female
ancestors, the sacred sites that they passed, and the mythological significance of the bush tucker that they collected. Her
designs are associated with the rock hole sites of Palturunya and Wirrulnga, east of the Kiwirrkura Community (Mount Webb)
in Western Australia. The concentric circles represent rock holes and the arcs represent the higher rocky outcrops near the
site. The U shapes represent women camped at the site.
Whimsical humor and on-target wit are tinged with a palpable—though unsentimental--homage to all our prima donnas, a
wistful tribute to their steadfastness, courage, and vulnerability.
“The definitive and obsessive stability of his figurative archetypes seems to have been solely mental, fixed in the memory,
not taken from existing models. For Carlo, art dried up in its creation: each finished sheet was abandoned, and then
preserved by other people…Painting had become the only way of giving dignity to his life, remembering, dreaming,
travelling… of communicating we are not sure, though some heart-rendering cries of pain in the words included in his
paintings could lead to this belief. The meaning of Carlo’s work remains by its very nature unknowable and the alleged keys
to a general decoding of his work are ridiculous and laughable. He never spoke, and there is no evidence of any, however
brilliant, idea of his artistic intentions. “
-Sergio Marinelli
Exerpted from “Carlo, excluded and accepted”
Carlo Zinelli: Catalogo Generale
Traumatized by his experiences in World War II, and suffering from a mental illness, Carlo Zinelli was committed to the
San Giacomo Psychiatric Hospital in Verona, where he created his paintings. Championed by Jean Dubuffet, Zinelli is one of
the masters of the ‘Art Brut’ movement.
Part of a 2005 series predicated on brain anatomy and symptomatology in autism spectrum research; in this case, anomalies
in cortical minicolumnar organization. In this drawing I zeroed in on auditory hypersensitivity as one of the behavioral
manifestations; hence, imagining my head as a giant bat cave-cum-neurolab swamped by cortical slices gone wild,
auricular clutter (minus the Q-tips), infrasonic chitchat, and pleas for quiet.
Psycho Kitty pushed my re-set button.
“The animus of the forest, lost in the woods.”
From the many influences in our culture, Birch’s wall sculpture offers a hybrid of decorative and religious
interpretations. His use of found objects and simple materials present a keen observation of the artist’s homage to a
colleague.
"The seen needs the unseen - fossilized memory, buried."
In the Indian Fables of Bidpai, there is a story of a crocodile and monkey who begin as friends. When the crocodile
deceives the monkey and cons him into riding to his home 'for a meal', he admits mid river that his sick wife needs to eat
the monkey's heart. The monkey saves himself by claiming he left his heart at home and must be taken back to get it. The
crocodile falls for the trick and when the monkey is safe he tells the crocodile how foolish he is. "Don't you know that
we carry our hearts within us?" This collage is a variation on the tale.
The Video Vic character in Nightmare was created in 1969. These films were made from hand painted paper dolls and
background sets. The female doll character has been central to the storyline for many years. The digital video editing
programs that have since become available offer tools that make it possible to combine real life video, 3-D background sets
and animated dolls into a new world of its own.
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