Archives

Hubbell

Jerry Hubbell had worked in banking before starting his own farming business in 1980.  To mend implements, he took welding lessons, and after the needed repairs were finished, he began to “experiment.”  He reshaped discarded metal scraps into a cowboy-driven stagecoach, a purple people eating dragon, Batman on a motorcycle, and many more. The stagecoach […]

Culver part 2 artworks

Bringing together his interests in history, science, and science fiction, John’s drawings display images derived from the historical past along with projections about the distant future.  Among the old masters, he especially admires Leonardo Da Vinci’s melding of art and science – his centuries early predictions and inventions that must have seemed like science fiction […]

Culver part 1

“I might be light in the pocketbook, but the spirit of my art has me high.  Money don’t have feelings, but art do – it takes you to the next world – its powerful.” John Culver, April 21, 2024   John Culver spends hours working on his meticulously detailed drawings most days.  He lives frugally […]

Mann part 5 Slide Projections

Ronald Mann is a self-taught Vietnam veteran artist. His wife Ricki was an amateur painter, and after returning from the war with un-diganosed PTSD, Ron started to make paintings using her leftover materials.  In recent years Ron has created new layers of meaning in his work by photographing projections of slides of his paintings onto […]

Mann part 2 Overview Paintings

Ronald Mann is a self-taught Vietnam veteran artist. His wife Ricki was an amateur painter, and after returning from the war with un-diganosed PTSD, Ron started to make paintings using her leftover materials.  Ron had no background or training in art, and remains uninterested in art history or the contemporary artworld. A form of self-therapy, […]

Mann part 3 B and W Paintings

Ronald Mann is a self-taught Vietnam veteran artist. His wife Ricki was an amateur painter, and after returning from the war with un-diganosed PTSD, Ron started to make paintings using her leftover materials.  The fist slide, When Johnny Comes Home, shows physically and emotionally wounded soldiers returning from Vietnam – they beat their own drums […]

Mann part 4 Color Paintings

Ronald Mann is a self-taught Vietnam veteran artist. His wife Ricki was an amateur painter, and after returning from the war with un-diganosed PTSD, Ron started to make paintings using her leftover materials.  The fist slide shows their only collaboration The Other Side.  It was exhibited with the caption “Ricki trying to charge into the […]

Loya

After retiring from Levi Strauss factory work in 1995, Rufino Loya Rivas set out to improve the modest family house he and his wife were able to afford in 1973.  With no art or construction training in his background, he taught himself masonry and metalworking skills and has created a spiritually uplifting environment that contrasts […]

Thompson part 2 paintings

William Thompson provided this information about the numbered series of large-scale paintings that starts with slide #5 (showing the American flag): “Here is a list of the 7 paintings series and the sequence they were painted along with the title of each painting.  Each painting is 12 x 15’ acrylic on heavy canvas. 1 – […]

Thompson part 1

William Thomas Thompson and his wife Janette live on the second floor of the Gassaway Mansion in Greenville, South Carolina. The Thompson family business makes the first floor and grounds available for an events business. A fairy tale castle location for a wedding reception – complete with an apocalyptic painter’s studio up in the turret!  […]

Kox

Norbert Kox welded together and painted his “Demon Hunter” motorcycle while a member of the Waterloo (Iowa) Outlaws biker gang in the mid-1970’s. A few years earlier, one particularly bad hallucinogenic ‘trip’ caused a series of flashbacks, as well as a persistent feeling that God was directing him to quit the gang and live like […]

Mann RV Profile

“A child can paint better than that,” Ronald Mann’s ex-wife would say.  “I do agree with you, but I’m just going to paint anyway. It [makes] no difference to me whether it’s childish or not.” Outside a tavern near Flint, Michigan about forty years earlier, he’d been caught-up in an altercation: “the judge told me, […]

Dominic ‘Cano’ Espinoza

  Twisted wire-formed letters near the top spell out “Jesus Cristo,” [slide 1] and sometimes when Dominic ‘Cano’ Espinoza “looks real close” at his castle, he can see the crucified face of Jesus looking back.  He built in no such anthropomorphic features, but to him the castle becomes an acheiropoieton – a massive, embossed metal […]

Dobberstein

Website for the Shrine of the Grotto of the Redemption        

Baron

Ho Baron welcomes visitors and his sculpture garden art environment is open for visitors daily. Ho’s website

Every

Health problems have prevented Tom Every – AKA Dr. Evermor – form working for many years, but his wife Lady Eleanor opens the well-maintained park five days a week.  Dr. Evermor’s website  

Portraits of ‘Outsider’ and Visionary Artists, 2019-

Often self-taught ‘artists’ don’t think of themselves as, or like to be called ‘artists’.  They may not produce any ‘for sale’ art objects, their work may be too personal, or it may be intended to carry religious messages from God (for which they accept no personal credit).  Many think of themselves as being too unskilled […]

Barile 2

Silvio Barile recalled hiding as a young boy from Allied bombing with his parents and siblings in the mountains around their south central Italian village of Ausonia. They “lost everything,” and in the mid-1950’s, came to America as WWII refugees. Hardly a prototypical ‘outsider’ artist, Barile went on to live the American Dream: he married, […]

Barile 1

His house was a short walk from the restaurant and he filled the approximately one acre wooded area between with concrete, stone, and found object sculptures, mostly from mythology and Italian history: art is a “guide for life,” and is “too important to sell.”

Alexander

A retired grade school and part-time art teacher, Lindsey Alexander has turned sections of her home and backyard into modern-day “grottos” memorializing personal family histories. She uses blue Estée Lauder bottles from her mother’s personal collection, diary and hand-written letter transfers onto ceramic tile, shards of fine china, collected mementos, jewels, sequins, beads, eggshells, handmade […]