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| "Cafe Costa Rica" 20x20 acrylic on canvas (SOLD), Prints available |
As a self-taught artist myself, I wanted to shine a light on the anguish and
healing that many of us share in common. I’ve chosen a few artists that are famous and
well-known, and a few who never got above the sad circumstances of their lives
until long after their deaths.
Many artists were driven to art in the process of mending
from a long-term illness or accident. Once they tasted the sweet wine of
creation, they found the healing balm of discovery and newness of life. While
their minds and hearts were caught up in the rapture of creativity, they forgot
about self-pity and pain and unleashed it instead upon paper, wood and canvas.
My own early beginnings happened after a painful divorce. Remarkable magic occurs when emotions travel from brain
and heart through the arm, into the fingers, down the brush and onto a blank
surface. Explosions of the mind keep you focused and stayed on what’s happening
before your eyes. The smoothness of paint encourages experimentation and afterward,
you are never the same.
Frida Kahlo was
born in 1907 and died in 1954. In 1922, she entered the National Preparatory School
with the intent to study medicine and medical illustration. Three years later,
she was in a near-fatal bus accident, which left her with many broken bones,
including her legs, ribs, back, and collarbone. While recovering from the
accident, she began to paint.
In 1928, she sought out Diego Rivera, a Mexican Rivera,
for advice on her works, and would later marry him. Her paintings were
surrealist. She used bright colors, and often depicted Mexican folk themes. Her
first one-woman art show was in New York in 1938. In 1953, she had her first
solo show in Mexico. Her work began to gain more attention in the 1970s, and
many of her works are displayed in her former residence. Her bright outdoor scenes and bold self-portraits continue to amuse and delight us.
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| (Henri Rousseau -- Fight between a tiger and a buffalo) |
Henri Rousseau
was a post-Impressionist painter who was born in 1844 and died in
1910. He worked for a lawyer and a toll collector to support his mother and
wife. It was his job as a toll collector that would earn him the nickname
"Le Douanier" (customs office.) Ridiculed
during his lifetime by critics, he came to be recognized as a self-taught
genius whose works are of high artistic quality.
Rousseau began to paint in his early 40's and would
retire at 49 to focus on painting full-time. He taught himself by copying art
displayed at the Louvre, but would go on to establish his own style of
painting. His paintings are noted for their flat style and great imagination.
His most famous works depict jungle scenes, though he never saw a jungle.
Several of his paintings are on display at the Louvre.
Winslow Homer was
an American landscape artist who was born in 1836 and died in 1910. He was mainly
self-taught and spent 20 years as a commercial illustrator before taking up oil
painting full-time. He would open his own studio in New York City in 1859 and
started to take classes at the National Academy of Design. By this time, he was
already producing a great number of works. His early paintings often depict
rural farm scenes. Later paintings would display marine subjects, such as
fishermen and boating. He would later become best known for his paintings with
marine themes.
Riet van Halder is a Dutch housewife who began to draw and paint at the
age of fifty-nine after a voice urged her to do so while she was vacuuming the
house.” Her family found it strange to see her suddenly become absorbed in
painting. In the Netherlands, she had easy access to a vast array of ink,
paint, and other media, which she explored in her art. She preferred paint
applied with a multitude of implements on a variety of high quality paper and
linen. Fittingly, she used a varied color palette. Her paintings are often
densely populated with swirling, free form human and animal figures, which have
predominately benevolent expressions.
“Her drawings
are a response to an imagined world that is revealed, dreamlike, in the act of
drawing and painting.” She explained that after finishing a work she was as
captured by its beauty and mystery as a first time viewer. In 2004, her ability
to create was ended abruptly by chemotherapy, which she received for a melanoma
on her ear.
Woodie Long grew up in a family of
twelve in a racially
mixed sharecropping community in Plant City, Florida. As a young man, he worked
as a sharecropper and itinerant laborer. He told me that he had picked just
about every crop that existed in the southeastern US. Most of his life, Long
was employed as a professional contract painter. This work took him as far as
Saudi Arabia, where he met his wife, Dot. Long said that there he became
acquainted with the Prince, now King, while painting the Palace and other Royal
buildings. Dot and Woodie subsequently traveled for a year in Southeast Asia
before they settled in south Alabama to be near family.
Long began
his memory paintings in 1988 while recuperating from a respiratory illness
brought on by long-term exposure to oil paint.
He was a great storyteller, and
was often encouraged by family and friends to recount his own experiences. He
saw his wife’s hobby watercolor set as a good way to record his memories. Long
certainly knew how to handle a brush and during his career had experimented occasionally
with painting figures. He told me that on jobs, he often created a large image
on each wall before painting over it.
Melissa Polhamus was born in
Ludwigsburg, Germany.
She is the adopted daughter of a U.S. military serviceman and his wife and grew
up in several different East Coast military towns. She earned a degree in
history from Virginia Polytechnic University. “In 1989, she began to draw from
her own imagination while recuperating from depression suffered in the wake of
an automobile accident.”
Polhamus is
self-taught as an artist. Her undiluted watercolor and ink drawings are
characterized by intense, densely fragmented compositions. “She has described
the process of creating these works as entirely spontaneous and intuitive.” They
have a dreamlike narrative quality in which convoluted environments are
typically inhabited by cartoonish clothed figures as they carry out various
activities that are alternately mundane, mysterious, or sinister, through a
labyrinth of interconnected spaces. “Her drawings often include peculiar
vehicles, weaponry, musical instruments, stylized vegetation and jaggedly
geometric patterns that contribute to a pervasive sense of anxiety.” They are
mysteriously compelling and consistently original in style. From a distance,
the palette and patterns of her work may resemble certain Mexican Folk
drawings.
Thank you to the following Gallery for providing these bios and paintings:
