I saw a documentary about this man Henry Darger last night. WOW. Henry Darger was a recluse who lived alone for over 40 years in a small apartment in Chicago. When he became ill and was forced to leave his apartment the landloards that came over to take care of the place were astounded.

They found hundreds, thousands of paintings, drawings, collages and tracings. Some of these paintings and collages were over 10 feet long and painted on both sides of his homemade "canvases".

In addition they found a 15,000 page novel and an uncompleted 8,000 page sequel.

I don't know if this guy was a genius or a madman, but this was one interesting show. Check it out if you get a chance. I believe it was called "In the Realms of the Unreal" and was featured on the PBS program P.O.V. Fascinating.

15,000 pages ..I'm not suprised the title itself is long enough

"The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion."

heres a link that tells all

http://www.acer-access.com/~darger@acer-access.com/


Howard

Thanks for the link Howard. I actually looked at that one this morning. There are quite a few sites about this guy but I hadn't heard of him before. Some of his works sells for five figures and more.

Nobody can even figure out what was going on in this guys head. He had some definite "issues" but the sheer volume of stuff that he produced is mind boggling.

He was a bit ahead of his time. Now we have blogs and photoshop. How many million word oeuvres are out there now illustrated in similar ways from media images? We may never know till webmasters start to clean out their drives from old accounts.

That's a good point. I was just freaked out at the amount of physical work he did, and the amount of media that he had around. Literally thousands and thousands of clipping from comic books and newspapers etc.

Jonathan, are you familiar with Darger? I know you went to an Arts College and his works were discovered in the early 70's. They must have been disscussing this guy on campuses (campi?) all over the country around the time you were in school.

Have you seen the documentary?

They actaully used modern methods to animate some of his works in the program. It was just an incredible story. I'm always intrigued by these kind of people that seem to live in a world all of their own. And Henry Darger did that BIG TIME.

I saw some of Harry Darger's original art in a show of outsider art in Atlanta perhaps six or seven years ago. He "sampled" images from magazines, and in one of the works displayed, needed a heroic figure on a horse to illustrate a scene from his 15,000 page novel. He used a race horse, complete with the jockey. The image was huge. Even though you could see that the illustration was pieced together from photos from magazines, it had a surprising power and intensity.

If you google search "outsider art," "intuitive art," or "visionary art," you will find many other interesting artists, but I agree that Darger is in a class by himself. I would love to see this documentary!

Yours,

Paul

Dr Wilson,

You can see a trailer for the show on this site. You may be able to check your local PBS stations there as well. To see if it will re-run.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/intherealms/

Darger was the subject of some articles when his works were first uncovered and it made the news. It was mentioned at college and compared with J.M.Basquiet and others of that time (80's) and earlier like Robert Crumb. All somewhat eccentric people. Fortunately we still have R. Crumb to appreciate.