• SELBY WARREN 1887–1979 Trunkey Creek, NSW, Australia Warren was an Australian bushman who spent his life in the small settlement...
    SELBY WARREN
    1887–1979
    Trunkey Creek, NSW, Australia

    Warren was an Australian bushman who spent his life in the small settlement of Trunkey Creek and began making visual records of his life experiences in 1963 on found materials using brushes he made with his own hair. that are elemental and soul-stirring. Memory paintings are anchored in rural scenes of his life shearing, as a stockman, itinerant laboring, and in expressions of rural folklore; poems and ballads he liked to recall; iconic Australian landmarks and political figures, fusing his paintings with elaborate frames that are constructions. 
     
    Discovered when he was 85 years old when a painting was seen hung at local pub the Black Stump, Warren drew a great deal of attention over a period of three years after his first exhibition at the age of 85 at Rudy Komon's legendary gallery in Sydney in 1972 – followed by exhibitions in Melbourne and Brisbane which led to much critical and media acclaim. As Komon remarked Warren was "one of Australia's greatest art finds"... "one of a half a dozen like him in the world." 

    "I've lived in the bush all me life. I've seen things that don't happen in Australia any more...So when I took up painting I was able to put it all down."  
    -Selby Warren, in Lenore Nicklin, 'Bush painter waltzes in', Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February, 1972
  • ROSE DESMITH GREENMAN 1898-1983 Boston, MA Seemingly out of nowhere, Greenman (b. Boston, MA), began drawing exultant, radiant vessels and...
    ROSE DESMITH GREENMAN
    1898-1983
    Boston, MA
    Seemingly out of nowhere, Greenman (b. Boston, MA), began drawing exultant, radiant vessels and trees obsessively in her 70s over a period of seven years while struggling with Alzheimer's disease. Spending most hours alone, she used pencils, pens, crayons and markers to interpret her world virtuosically - creating demur, constrained drawings of her home, garden, neighborhood in Boston, and family as well as transformative works from her imagination out of saved scraps of paper from family members. Greenman's diminutive vessels and larger botanical and architectural works embody a markmaking which is woven as tightly and expressively as it possesses an all-encompassing reverence and boundlessness.