Giving Outsider Art at Home
Chicago painter Ray Yoshida lives and works in a modest brick building on a quiet street in one of Chicago’s fading polish neighborhoods. His first floor studio is just as it was the day he moved in and began painting there a steep flight of stairs leads into his living room and a thicket of painted wooden smoking stand-an, a memorable home design and home improvement. Introduction to: Yoshida’s collection of objects that, in his words, “have a certain particularity about them.”
Yoshida groups similar pieces most of them the work of folk or outsider artists, much as a taxonomist might order on array of butterflies: boats and spool furniture fill an alcove; a score of Mexican retablos line a corner; a dozen Mexican masks hang above a fine tramp art cabinet. The chipped edges or Yoshida’s tramp art pieces are reminiscent of the surface he creates in his painting with flecks of color. “Collecting,” he says “has definitely influenced my work.”
An influential teacher at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago for more than twenty-five-years, Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, and Jim Nutt-are known for their high-pitched, often totemic figurative paintings, which are full of tension both in their psychology and in the way they are constructed. The work of these four artists encompasses a certain obsession-and the spaces where they live are extensions of the art they make and the art they collect. House, museum, and studio have melded together, creating an environment of total immersion.
The quickly, even compulsive quality of the imagist’ work is echoed in the art they have chosen to acquire: the handiwork of untrained artists who paint or carve or make assemblages because they must, with little thought of recognition or compensation.
