J. Theodore “Ted” Diamond

American 1938-1986

Diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolarity, Diamond spent most of his adult life under care, obsessed with death, eventually taking his own life on May 8, 1986 at forty-eight years of age. All works were made in a fecund twenty-year period between 1966 and 1986 when Diamond was living in the psychiatric ward of the Charles River Hospital in Boston. Although he studied off and on at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Diamond did not graduate and never developed a professional career. After his suicide a few hundred works that had been mounted in notebooks and kept in his room at the hospital were taken by his only heir, a dear friend of Denenberg's who kept them safe for over 30 years. 

The paintings’ energy, deft handling and powerful scale beyond their humble size recalls James Ensor’s visions and Francis Bacon's forms. Their emotional content is achieved through idiosyncratic draughtsmanship and coloristic mastery. Even a few pure abstractions display the fever of schizophrenia. Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator Emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation, sees in them a "Jazz" spirit, a mid-60s bohemianism, and an “Outsider’s’” vision in the deepest sense. These arresting works have until now been seen only once out of the notebooks in which they had been carefully preserved for over 50 years.

Stuart Denenebreg

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."