Rare is the artist who could claim to have dived as deep into the unconscious and survived the journey — bringing back images of intense imagination and technical brilliance. As proof, this recluse kept his life’s works buried in a dilapidated shack in the hills of Eugene, Oregon. The...
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.
Iraqi Phoenix
Qasim Sabti is the founder of a group of Iraqi artists called “The Iraqi Phoenix,” owing not only to their own survival during their country’s war and upheaval but to their creative vision that persisted. Among the most important of Sabti’s artworks are...
His images of politics, the environment, and sex are as explosive now as they were 60 years ago. Not only did he invent a new printing medium but a New York Times critic called him “the world’s greatest living carver of wood; there’s not even anyone close.”
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.
Pessemier is a Modern Impressionist living in Paris. He paints en plein air at the same locations where the great Impressionists set up their easels — not only around Paris but all over France. He has exhibited extensively in Paris since the 1990s, including eight shows at the famous Le...
