Back online early April....

Robert Kinmont

At the beginning of the 1970s, around the time he turned 30 and just as people were picking up on his droll, low-key work, Robert Kinmont decided to stop making art and retire to upstate California. Here, he lived a rural life surrounded by the wilderness he loved, raised his kids...oh, and built his own school, called Coyote. Legend has it that he taught his students at Coyote about human creativity by cooking breakfast for them over a camp stove set up on the floor of their art school classroom. Then in 1978 he closed the school and moved to Santa Rosa to be a carpenter, a trade he pursued for the next 20 years. About 5 years ago he went back into his studio and started making art again.

He makes whimsical sculptures from natural materials which reflect his love of the American wilderness – logs, twigs, wooden boards – but its his irreverent, personal photographs from the 60s which have the real charm. The series 8 Natural Handstands shows the artist in different outdoor settings doing handstands; the one at the top of the page in particular is a standout image, with Kinmont  balanced on a rocky outcrop with a sweeping landscape behind him. Then there’s My Favourite Dirt Roads, which shows exactly that: the artist’s favourite tracks, captured on square format black and white. Seen out of context as individual images they might seem nothing much, but when you know the title of the series and appreciate Kinmont deadpan ways, they make perfect sense. Just About The Right Size is another series, this time of self portraits showing the  bearded artist, not long before he went on his extended sabbatical, holding various everyday objects…which are, naturally, the size they really should be.

Just About The Right Size #1

Just About The Right Size #2

Walk Straight Ahead and Measure To The Side

All images © Robert Kinmont/Alexander & Bonin Gallery

Nicholas Di Genova

Continuing with more fantastical fauna, this is the work of young Canadian artist Nicholas Di Genova. Entitled Chimera, this series gives full reign to Di Genova’s evolutionary imagination, as he creates apparently scientific illustrations of strange hybrids and mutated species. The Chimera was a monstrous fire-breathing creature of Greek mythology, composed of the body and head of a lion, with a goat’s head emerging from its back and a snake for a tail. Nasty! Di Genova imagines similarly fantastical composite creatures, though they seem slightly less ferocious: a bear bred with a bird, a giraffe with a daffodil flower for its head or a tree frog–cockerel hybrid, for instance. The creatures all fit within Di Genova’s own imagined ecosystems, each one part of a group assigned to a particular region – jungle, fresh water, desert, etc. Painstakingly hand-drawn in black pen, with their apparent biological ancestors indicated in small grids and subsets in each picture, the level of detail and complexity in these highly original drawings almost defies belief. Click the thumbnails to see for yourself.

Temperate Forest, 2009

Fresh Water Region, 2009

Savannah Region, 2009

Polar Region, 2009

Jungle Region, 2009

All images © Nicholas Di Genova/Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, NY

Simen Johan

A white stag caught in a sun-dappled snowy forest; a weary, majestic bison resting on a dusty plain; a sleuth of bears feeding from a pile of refuse; a proud llama with a Poodle-cut coat; these are just some of the majestic, mysterious creatures photographed by Simen Johan in his ongoing series Until The Kingdom Comes. Painstakingly creating each image from traditional photography (the animals are, for the most part, real, and photographed at zoos or farms) and digital techniques, Johan has fashioned a strange but believable world filled with almost mythical beasts, and devoid of humans. Did the animals finally rise up and devour homo sapiens, or is this a primitive world before man made his mark? The work is open to interpretation, and Johan is not fussed about providing an answer. He likes the unknown, and the unease that creates. Born in Norway but based in New York since 1992, his work explores our use of fantasy to try and compensate for things we can’t easily explain. As he says, “we construct meaning by necessity, allowing fantasy to shape our experience of reality. Religion is the prime example of how we create myths to alleviate fear.”

The contemporary painter Walton Ford explores similar themes, and he too has fashioned a fantastical animal kingdom in his work, but Johan’s chosen medium and the sheer believability of his photographs makes them that much more sinister and powerful. Looking at his images, the viewer senses something is amiss and feels they aren’t real, but its hard to pinpoint exactly why they’re not. In the few unmapped wildernesses still left on the Earth, perhaps there are majestic animals such as this still ruling their lands.

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

Untitled, from the series Evidence Of Things Unseen

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

Untitled, from the series Evidence Of Things Unseen

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

Untitled, from the series Until The Kingdom Comes

All images © Simen Johan

Eugene Andolsek

Eugene Andolsek was an American stenographer, who, to escape the humdrum existence of his daily life, created dazzling, complex drawings in his spare time whilst in a trance-like state. Untrained as an artist and working from a kitchen table in a house he shared with his troubled, ailing mother, Andolsek worked on simple graph paper with nothing more than a straight edge, a pair of compasses and coloured inks which he mixed himself, to wild effect.

Unhappy and disillusioned with his job for Rock Island Railroad, starting in the 1950s Andolsek would unwind after work by drawing complicated patterns in black ink, then colouring in the resulting shapes. The release was cathartic and pretty soon he was getting lost in the intricacies of his work and the geometric worlds he created, drawing and colouring for hours on end in a trance. He didn’t consider what he was making as ‘art’ and once each image was finished he would stash it away in a drawer or cupboard. Like many other Outsider artists, he was driven by an inner urge to draw, and it was the act itself rather than the finished work that compelled him to create. It was only in later life when failing health and poor eyesight forced him to seek help that a careworker saw his drawings and realised Andolsek’s was a unique, unknown talent.

At first glance nowadays these images appear to be computer generated, and nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary, but the fact that they were made by one man’s hand with simple tools up to 60 years ago only makes them all the more incredible. As with so many images shown on F O V, click on the thumbnails to see them in better detail and appreciate the craft and vision of this strange, gifted artist, who passed away in 2008.

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All images © Estate of Eugene Andolsek/American Primitive Gallery