“Every Monday morning Wölfli is given a new pencil and two large sheets of unprinted newsprint. The pencil is used up in two days; then he has to make do with the stubs he has saved or with whatever he can beg off someone else. He often writes with pieces only five to seven millimetres long and even with the broken-off points of lead, which he handles deftly, holding them between his fingernails. He carefully collects packing paper and any other paper he can get from the guards and patients in his area; otherwise he would run out of paper before the next Sunday night. At Christmas the house gives him a box of coloured pencils, which lasts him two or three weeks at the most.”
-Dr. Walter Mortgenthaler, from his book “A Psychiatric Patient as Artist” on Adolph Wolfli
For many, art is a struggle to free the mind, and rid it of its demons. Experts in the treatment of the mentally ill have used art as therapy for many years, and this art has an honesty, noise, and force to it. If you live in or around the Houston area, check out the Seeing Stars Collection showing at the Menil Gallery through January 15. The Menil is always free.
Clik here to view.
There's a whole lot of singing it's never gonna be heard/Disappearing every day without so much as a word somehow/I think I broke the wings off of a little songbird/She's never gonna fly to the top of the world right now"-Dixie Chicks
Horror Vacui
The sane, oddly enough,
don’t value pencils.
Or paper.
But Wolfli did, and
his birds do.
Perhaps the sane haven’t
delved deeply enough
into Moria,
perhaps they haven’t unearthed
their monsters,
perhaps they haven’t seen
their carnage,
perhaps they have never
been
carnage.
Perhaps they have never
tried to claw their way back
up
where there used to be light.
His worn down nubs and treasured pages,
Vehicles the insane drive
over chaotic staffs of music,
form a Requiem.
Paper trumpets sound
in a raging mind.
Birds sing.
The focus, the discipline
The terrible crazy honesty
required to allow one’s mind to wander
and accurately catalog the journey
without flinching,
without ignoring anything,
without diluting the color,
or wasting one precious inch of paper
seems completely nuts to people with
only half a brain.
Clik here to view.
Horror vacui: fear of empty space