Alienists

Blue Birds in the Tree-Scottie Wilson ca 1960

Sometimes I am overcome with the suspicion
That I am a stranger on this earth
Descended from a peripheral order of beings
An alien on this planet come from a distant star,
Faraway galaxy, parallax dimension
Some shape of a castaway, convict or changeling
Perhaps just a forgetful idler who slept passed their stop
And shuffled off at the end of the line

But the trick is to be at ease

Of course I have on occasion demanded to see the manager
But that was met with shrugs and sighs conveying
Studied confusion, blank indifference or downright hostility
Nobody seemed to know anything and cared even less
Initially I thought well what is the point of them?
But maybe they were feigning ignorance
Covering their tracks, keeping secrets, hiding truths
About myself however banal they turned out to be

Surely you realise that this is not the way to go about things
I think we may have a situation
You are clearly not at ease with yourself and your surroundings

Surrounded by screens bombarded by images and text
Deluged with data indices statistics and factoids
Which I passively absorbed hoping to later sift and sort
Through the theories ideologies conspiracies and revelations
Perhaps somewhere in this sewer of misinformation
I can decipher a message from a distant dimension
A faraway star, a parallex galaxy my lost
Home that I fell from those forgotten aeons ago

You know we have ways of making you feel at ease
And you have, despite our repeated warnings
Persisted in persisting
You leave us no choice so…
You are at ease
You are at ease in yourself and your surroundings
You are at ease
You are at ease in yourself
You are at ease in your surroundings
You are at ease
You are at ease in yourself and your surroundings
You are at ease in yourself
You will be what we want you to be
Feel what we want you to feel
Say what we want you to say
Think what we want you to think
Be what we want you to be
You are now at ease in yourself and your surroundings

As long as I do not remember certain moments
Incidences or sensations that elicit strong reactions
Then I will be alright, I will be at ease with myself
I doubt it ever happened that I shot my cuffs,
Lifted my finger signaling for you to come over,
Bend over my knee and lift up your skirt
That only happened in my non-existent home
Vanished star, imploded galaxy, voided dimension

They have promised me that when I feel completely
At ease in myself and my surroundings
That I will be granted a vision of the birds of paradise
Descending down from the vast unreachable heavens
Onto these somnolent suburban streets and gardens
Setting hearts and minds ablaze with motion and colour
To carry us away toward a richer more vibrant realm
A distant galaxy, faraway dimension, parallax star.

Cosmic Geometry

Emma Kunz

In 1938 the Swiss clairvoyant and telepathic healer Emma Kunz began to channel large scale drawings on graph paper using coloured pencils, crayons and a pendulum. During the creation of a piece, which could take up to 48 hours, Kunz neither slept or ate, subsisting entirely on liquids. Neighbours commented that the light was always on at her home. The drawings were then used as a therapeutic tool for her patients, whom she would encourage to meditate upon the mandala-like patterns.

I was first led to this astonishing artist by a comment about my post on the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, (thank you herongrace). There are indeed similarities, both were female abstract artists with an all consuming interest in mysticism and spiritualism, whose mediumistic art goes far beyond aesthetic formal concerns. Both Klint and Kunz were only discovered after their deaths, and indeed were two-thirds of an exhibition on leading female abstract artists, the other being Agnes Martin. However Klint was a professional artist who kept her groundbreaking innovations a secret, while Kunz had no formal artistic training but thought highly enough of her work (and rightly so) to publish two books.

Since the first exhibition in 1973, ten years after her death, Kunz’s work has been show around the world, including a joint show with Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner. The Emma Kunz Museum in Wurenlos, Switzerland houses 70 of her most important artworks.

Emma Kunz 1

Emma Kunz 2

Emma Kunz 3

Emma Kunz 4

Emma Kunz 5

Emma Kunz 6

Emma Kunz 7

Emma Kunz 8

Sens-Plastique

Malcolm de Chazal

Born into a wealthy colonial  family with roots in the French aristocracy and which included several Rosicrucians and Swedenborgians, the writer, painter and visionary Malcolm De Chazal (1902-1981) spent his whole life on the island of Mauritius, with the exception of six years in Baton Rouge, where he completed his secondary education before attending Louisiana State University as an engineering student. Upon his return to the island he worked as an agronomist in the sugar plantations before quitting the field after he published a scathing critique on the methods and economy of the industry. He then worked as a civil servant before retiring at the age of 55. From 1940 however he increasingly dedicated himself to writing and later painting.

His most famous work is Sens-Plastique, a collection of thousands of aphorisms. The work was suggested after a visionary encounter with an azalea. While out for a walk, de Chazal observed the flower and then realised that the azalea was looking at him. He was then struck with the revelation that: “I became a flower while being myself all the time“, and that everything in the universe, be it animal, vegetable, mineral or human, was analogous. The aphorisms is Sens-Plastique are a riot of poetic analogy and concrete, visual metaphor.  It was hailed by the Surrealists; Andre Breton, Jean Paulhan, Georges Bataille and the originator of the term Art Brut, Jean Dubuffet all lauded de Chazal as a genius. Outside of French artistic circles the poet W.H Auden also championed Sens-Plastique.

In the 1950’s De Chazal took up painting at the suggestion of Georges Braque. His paintings are charmingly emblematic images of the landscape, flora and fauna of his beloved island home, the bold colours blazing with a visionary intensity.

An early supporter of Mauritian independence and the dismantling of a racial caste system that allowed vast inequalities to exist, de Chazal also wrote a ‘spiritual history’ of the rocks and mountains of the island. He became increasingly reclusive in his later years

Below are a selection of aphorisms from Sens-Plastique and a slideshow of his fauvist flavoured paintings.

A fish in fear of its life turns into water. In the mutual pursuit of sexual pleasure—the fear of joy and the joy of fear—our bodies liquefy each other in the waters of the soul, becoming so spiritual that hardly any corporal self is left. When we wake up after love, we look around desperately for our lost body.

If our five senses didn’t serve as brakes to slow us down and filter our sensations, sexual pleasure would strike us like lightning and electrocute our souls.

We see a friend’s eye as one and indivisible. A stranger’s eye we take in part by part: the white, the iris, and the pupil.

Silence is a lawyer who pleads with his eyes.

A flowing river is an infinity of superimposed production belts.

The sunflower keeps its eye on the sun with its back turned to the shade. We die facing life with our backs to death, as if we were walking out of a room backwards.

Petals are a plant’s eardrum. Distant sounds make them quiver like the needle of a seismograph.

The kiss ends at the point of a needle. Sex ends fanning out. The kiss is an arrow. Sex is a fountain.

All the colours ‘rot’ in maroon, the rust of all rusts, the putrefying corpse of all dead colours, the sun’s humus, earth-color, resurrection’s winding-sheet, the shroud of life itself, the mound of eternity, the tomb of Light, Eternity’s burial vault.

Look too intensely at blue and your eye sees indigo. Look too intensely at red and you see garnet. If you look too intensely at yellow it turns green. A hypnotic stare injects blue into everything.

Water meanders on a completely smooth surface and toboggans down the glossiness of leaves.

The idealist walks on tiptoe, the materialist on his heels.

Ah is the shortest of human cries, Oh the longest. Man is born in an Ah and dies in an Oh, for birth is immediate and death is like an airplane taking off.

I am the owner of my shoulders, the tenant of my hips.

No matter how much leaves are fixed face to face they always look at each other aslant, whereas all fruits end up head-on however carelessly jumbled. A bunch of flowers is a house of coloured cards. A heap of fruit is a hive of coloured bees.

The flower has no weekday self, dressed as it always is in Sunday clothes.

The light would reach us more quickly in the morning and fade more slowly at night if the whole earth were divided into vast flower beds that called forth the light at dawn and clutched it longer at nightfall. Nature instituted summer for flowers long before man took summer over for his own uses.

To ‘hang on every word’ means to suck the eyes of the speaker.

The diamond scintillates less brilliantly when the fingers move rapidly than when they undulate and pivot. Glossy leaves throw off less light in a high wind than under the calm wavering of a breeze. Brusque movements of the eye cast a single gleam, and slow movements add a thousand others.

from Sens-Plastique

Malcolm de Chazal 1947

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Art Brut IV

Matthew Nightingale-Untitled 2018

Art brut also known as outsider or visionary or self taught art is an ever expanding field as it has attracted considerable attention in the 21st Century, now with its own dedicated galleries, museums, exhibitions, art fairs and publications. In this the fourth group post on this fascinating subject I have chosen three artists currently at work and one who, although working on creating his own imaginary utopia for sixty years was only discovered in the first decade of the new century, towards the end of his life.

Matthew Nightingale

An ex-prisoner Nightingale takes between six months to a year to create his meretricious crafted paintings, often combining mixed media. He has only recently agreed to representation, by the excellent Henry Boxer Gallery in the UK, as he is loathed to be parted with his work, so information concerning the artist is scarce. Highly decorative borders featuring flora, fauna and religious iconography frequently surround a central figure of a woman, skull or foetus in utero. Finely crafted inserts are another notable feature.

Matthew Nightingale-2018

Matthew Nightingale-2017/2018

Matthew Nightingale-2015

Anne Marie Grgich

One of the most respected art brut artists working today, who has exhibited all across the world, Grgich has mastered her own unique form of collage. Taking a book from the 1950’s she will over-paint, collage and then paint some more to form layers. Renowned for her bold expressionistic faces, I am also particularly taken by her vibrantly crowded recent works.

Anne Marie Grgich-Mute Siren

Anne Marie Grgich-Corseticus 2016

Anne Marie Grgich-Population Olympics 2013

Anne Marie Grgich

Margot

Apart from a brief artist statement which reveals that even the name is a pseudonym, I could find no information about this artist. Born in 1982, at the age of 32 Margot suddenly started drawing tirelessly. Precise, elaborate, bursting with a kinetic energy and a over-flowing symmetry, the art speaks for itself.

Margot-Construction utopique n31

Margo- Matrone

Margot-Alterego

Margot Untitled

Renaldo Kuhler

A talented self taught artist, Kuhler worked at the North Carolina Museum of Natural History as a scientific illustrator for most of his life. He always had happy memories of his brief period growing up in Rockland County, New York in an otherwise unhappy childhood and it was here that he based his imaginary kingdom of Rocaterrania, bordered by Canada and Northern New York state. Rocaterrania had its own laws, language, ethnic groups, customs and even members of a third sex called neutants.

Renaldo Kuhler

Renaldo_Kuhler

Renaldo Kuhler

Renaldo Kuhler

Renaldo Kuhler-Map of Rocaterrania

The Cryptic Geometry of Daniel Gonçalves

Daniel Gonçalves 1

Daniel Gonçalves is an entirely self taught draughtsman and painter from Porto, Portugal who has recently exhibited in his homeland as well as Paris, New York and London.

Gonçalves started drawing at the age of fifteen in 1992, however due to a difficult childhood and a peripatetic unsettled adult existence, combined with an innate perfectionism means that all work produced before 2015 is either lost or destroyed. Gonçalves first solo show was at the Gallery Cruzes Canhoto, Porto, Portugal in 2016.

Exhibiting a terrifying symmetrical precision, Gonçalves geometric abstraction has an obsessional hallucinogenic quality. Filled with Masonic and occult references, these drawings suggest sacred geometry, tantric images, mandalas, the doors to a bank vault containing the holy of holies, the key to open the crypt of our dreams.

Daniel Gonçalves 2

Daniel Gonçalves 3

Daniel Gonçalves 4

Daniel Gonçalves 5

Daniel Gonçalves 6

Daniel Gonçalves 7

Daniel Gonçalves 8

Daniel Gonçalves 9

Daniel Gonçalves 10

Daniel Gonçalves