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...
Yes, a street artist can become a master. “The Wizard of Brooklyn” was a completely self-taught artist who was also a holistic healer at one of the world’s largest mental hospitals. Psychoanalysts said he fit the profile of a classic reclusive hoarder. Bartnikowski found it...
“The easiest thing to say about Raymond Smith is that he follows in the tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Evans was his photography teacher at Yale in the early 1970s and Frank’s book The Americans (1958) is a source Smith acknowledges for his own book. But neither of these...
Starting in 1963, Kokoschka inspired this protegé, Wayne Ensrud, to dig deeper than other young contemporary artists, most of whom had been misled into thinking that a focus of massive energy and emotion was enough to become a great painter. Instead, his epiphany was that painting is a metaphysical...