“You know, what really captured my sense of wonder, irony, and even amazement is how weird things can appear when they are captured in a frame. That’s what I would like to communicate through my pictures.”
This early AbEx painter suffered three tragedies that resulted in a depression that made him become agoraphobic. Even the entreaties of Leo Castelli failed to draw out the prolific recluse. He wrote that his paintings opened a “back door” to aesthetic secrets held in the universe.
This visionary outsider created pictures depicting the “spiritual atoms world controlled by magnetic light.” The planetary worlds he painted were “controlled by the differential movement of magnetic light” or the “proto-plasma” of light.
In the history of American landscape painting, the visionary artists who pursued the paths of fantasy and mysticism are few. Here are poetic landscapes, part real, part fantasy — and always mystical.
