Dora Gonzalez was born and raised on a farm at the edge of a cloud forest in Esperza, Costa Rica. Throughout her life she enjoyed tending her garden, observing lively flowers and plants. Gonzalez mostly resided in an impoverished section of San Juan, she was spiritual in nature, filled with an abundance of joy and gratitude. Later in life she lost her eyesight. Her work is a reflection of her wholesome life experience and a celebration of a beautiful world.
Tom Blazier was born in Alton, Illinois and attended Washington University in St. Louis. He was a professional interior designer, fabric designer, painter, sculptor, photographer, and draftsman. This multi-talented man was a well-known and well-respected artist in St. Louis for many years, until his death in 1984. The many works of art that he did in his lifetime include oils, watercolors, pencil; and pen and ink drawings. His subjects included, but were not limited to landscapes, still life, portraiture, architectural renderings, and surrealistic studies; which all warrant admiration and further review.
Harriet Wiseman is a Philadelphia wife, mother of two, and grandmother who began painting in 1993 at the suggestion of a therapist. As a way to access her memories and emotions, drawing and painting opened the floodgates to her expression; she has been working prolifically ever since.
Wiseman paints on antique book covers, which she collects, as well as wood, and less often canvas or paper. Her subjects emerge out of the abstract patterning of the book covers, her role is to flesh out what she sees. Wiseman also began to see images in her paint palettes.
Most of the paintings on wood were originally Wiseman’s palettes, some as large as table tops, that she has worked into refined, colorful portraits.
Wisman’s painting is sometimes raw and direct, her colors brooding, and shadowed. Sometimes more intentional design elements and bold, complicated color relationships are prominent, reflecting her former career as a jewelry designer. Wiseman maintains an automatic method of working where she places her focus on visual pattern, whether the design of a book cover or the arrangement of blotches of color on her paint palette. Then Wiseman’s work begins to reveal itself to her. Concentration on materials is echoed in Wiseman’s subject matter, where she draws from personal history as well as a larger history of women. She focuses on material culture such as clothing and jewelry to note the time and place of her subjects, and hint at the importance of these personal stylistic choices in women’s lives as modes of expression.
Wiseman’s subjects stare out at the viewer with deep eyes telling of complex internal lives beneath the surface. This suggestion of deeply personal worlds in the minds of her subjects is a reflection of Wiseman’s need to communicate her own private world, and in this sense her paintings are all self-portraits. But Wiseman also reaches beyond herself, connecting her story to a universal one.
A respect and reverence for the past is evident in her work, it appeals to a broad audience. Harriet Wiseman, a well educated, well traveled woman, does not fit any stereotype about self-taught artists. Wiseman’s artwork reminds us that creative impulse is a human need that can no more easily be categorized or defined than contained; she is a true artist, telling a story she is compelled to tell.
Roy Reid (21 December 1937 – 10 January 2009) was a Jamaican painter. He was best known for his paintings depicting the Jamaican people and dress and those with themes of devastation such as fires etc., which often have moral and spiritual meaning.
Born in Portland, Jamaica, Reid was born to farming parents but dropped out of school at the age of 11 because he couldn’t read, only learning later at the age of 34 by reading the Bible. He later moved to Kingston to pursue a career.
Reid was regarded in his native country as one of the important figures among Jamaican ‘intuitive’ artists, generally those who are outsiders of the main schools of artistic activity and social circles on the island, especially as he was self-taught. Reid has made many notable exhibitions of his artwork, The Self Taught Artist Exhibition at the Institute of Jamaica in 1971, Eight Jamaican Primitives in Havana, Cuba in 1976; The Intuitive Eye at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1979, the Jamaican Intuitives in Wolverhampton, England and a Caribbean exhibition at the Un Nouveau Regard sur Les Caribes at Courbevoie, France in 1992. From the National Gallery, in Jamaica, he has given various exhibitions at Makonde Gallery, Pegasus Hotel in 1981, Bolivar Gallery in 1982 and the Mutual Life Gallery in 1987.
Reid also exhibited his artwork at the annual national exhibition of the National Gallery between December 2000 to February 2001, displaying his paintings The Unforgettable Defenceless Street People Removal and Everyone has a Cross to Bear.
Reid was also a credited author of art books and magazines, including Modern Jamaican Art, Art Today and the magazine Revue Noire.
In April 2005, Reid’s art studio and several rooms of his house in Grass Quit Glades, Kingston were gutted by fire.
Reid was found dead in the workshop of his St. Andrew home by his wife Mabel Reid on the morning of 10 January 2009. At the time, Reid was said to be suffering from prostate cancer, an enlarged heart and diabetes.
Nikifor was considered mentally disabled, illiterate, and he suffered from a severe speech and hearing impediment inherited from his mother. She was Lemko, an ethnic minority in Poland, and raised Nikifor in extreme poverty on her own. After her death during WWI, Nikifor began drawing and painting with materials around him such as scraps of paper, candy wrappers, and pencils. He often painted the streets of Poland, religious figures, and himself as a respected official, father, or bishop. Nikifor received recognition later in his life, created a countless amount of artwork, and today is regarded as Poland’s national treasure with his work exhibited around the globe.
Jack Savitsky (1910-1991) was born in Silver Creek, Pennsylvania and lived in Lansford, Pennsylvania almost all of his life. Savitsky started drawing as a boy when he had trouble spelling and continued throughout his life. He drew and painted on any available surface, including the walls of the mines.
Savitsky was skilled in using oil paint and commercial enamels. He painted depictions of houses and coal trains primarily on filter boards, but he also worked on sheet rock, plywood, beer trays, steel drum sections, and the bases of beer barrels. Although he suffered from many ailments, including emphysema, black lung, diabetes, arthritis, and prostate cancer, Savitsky always painted bright, vivid images of life.
Savitsky’s art has been exhibited nationwide by galleries and museums, and has been interpreted as “primitive pop” by art reviewers.
Pavel Leonov was born in Orel, Russia, south of Moscow near the Ukrainian border. At the age of 16 he fled to a hostel in Ukraine from an abusive father who he describes as a “brutal alcoholic.” He tried to succeed on his own and worked in factories, building tractors. At night, he taught himself to draw from a manual. Between 1936 and 1955 he spent much time in and out of labor camps partly because he was young and impetuous and partly because he had an innate sense of justice and an inquiring mind. Neither of these gifts were appreciated by the Soviet regimes.
Most of Leonov’s work is architectural in nature. The canvases are often laid out in a grid with elements of nature outlining a center for the many village scenes he portrays. They form compositions similar in feeling to a woven Persian rug. “His works are structured not as a single visual space but as a hierarchy of horizontal and vertical segments.” Although Leonov’s work has been shown internationally, his own people consider him a fool. This is of no consequence to the man who continues to dream of life as a joyful, wonderful experience.
Boscoe Holder (16 July 1921 – 21 April 2007), a Trinidad born artist of creative energy began painting at age five and never stopped until his death in 2007. His paintings have appeared in galleries and exhibitions in the US, UK, Finland, Sweden, Canada, Guyama, Brazil, as well as throughout the Caribbean. Holder is a household name in his native land where he is known best for his talents as a pianist, but also has become famous as a dancer, actor, television host, and performer of all sorts. In 1947 Holder went to New York for the first time. While there, he taught Caribbean dance at the Katherine Dunham School. Holder married, and later moved with his new wife, Shelia, to the UK in 1950.
While in Europe, Boscoe formed a dance group, Boscoe Holder and his Caribbean Dancers, and performed with them on television shows, cabarets, films, and club theaters across the continent. During this time, Boscoe painted regularly and continued to show his paintings. Holder returned to the Caribbean in 1969 and continued to show his work in galleries around the globe. In his native Trinidad he was continually honored by the government, receiving awards, invitations to exhibit his work, and even had a street named after him. In 1981 one of his paintings was given to Prince Charles and Lady Diana as a wedding gift, and his work remains in important private collections.
Shiela in Peignoir by Boscoe Holder, Galerie Bonheur (SOLD)
Regine Gilbert is a prolific, primitive painter who celebrates her own inner world with exuberant renderings of flowers, landscapes, and designs never seen in this world. we suspect that deep within the Austrian ancestry of blood Regine is a gypsy. How else does one successfully blend a somber and gay mysticism and dare to paint poppies the way she does, or to give us a sunrise which, for sheer madness, equals a Van Gogh? Yet, she maintains a fine balance between fact and fiction, which Van Gogh relinquished. Only gypsy could dramatize the bizarre and know when to come home to reality.
When Gilbert arrived in the United States in the mid-thirties, both her personality and her art came to the attention of the art world in New York. Her intent was to study in this new land of her choice, but she was advised to continue to develop her own particular genius. She took that advice and today numbers famous and elite among her ardent collectors.
In her work, there seems to be a happy unconcern with actual colors and contours. Yet, basically, she is a representational artist. Of recent years, Regine has given much of her time to research in the prismatic formula of the masters and has perfected a high-gloss, dimensional texture for light reflection. She paints at night, when the world is quiet and she can accomplish on canvas the visions seen only in dreams.
