Sesow on Outsider Art

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courant.com | Painting From Pain

Matt Sesow is an independent American artist residing in Washington, DC.
Individuals, galleries, and curators are invited to contact, and ask questions (email: sesow@sesow.com).

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Matt Sesow Lost A Hand To A Plane, But He Rejects Labels Such As `Art Brut'
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When he first started painting a little more than 10 years ago, Matt UTILITIES
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Sesow's work conveyed his reality: enduring a significant trauma in
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childhood.
Life
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stories
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Though titles such as "Lost Luggage," "Alone in Death" and
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"Waiting for Coagulation" provided hints, the story of Sesow's life
version
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became clear on the canvas. In 1974, a landing airplane struck
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Sesow, then 8 years old, as he played near his family's home in
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Lincoln, Neb. . Though surgeons reattached his left arm, severed by
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the propeller, they amputated his gangrenous dominant hand. At 9, PHOTO
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'Plucking
Sesow learned to write and draw all over again; at 27, he taught
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Daisies'
himself how to paint. At first, his favorite subject was the accident.
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"Losing my hand gives me an additional theme to explore
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through my paintings," says Sesow, who is known for blood-red
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backgrounds that sharply contrast the angry and averted orange
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'Plucking Daisies'
eyes of his heavily outlined figures.
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Henry J. Darger
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draw from while creating my work. Painting has enabled me to
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express things that would have not otherwise been possible."
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Though he says he's moved on from the trauma days, many
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Brut, known in some circles as Outsider Art, or raw art that is
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"uncooked by society." The movement is defined by the early 20thSubscribe
century painter Jean Dubuffet, and aficionados consider Art Brut the
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purest form of creation - art that often looks more like art therapy.
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And its popularity keeps growing.
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View Page 1 But even Art Brut has not entirely escaped the cultural manipulation
'repeating
Media Kit
of the gallery world. Like their starving Pratt and Parsons
myself'
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counterparts, many "discovered" Art Brut artists suffer through winesipping openings, pay agents and curators up to 50 percent
commissions and wind up selling their work for a song.
The categorization of Art Brut has also expanded. Originally meant
as art created almost solely by trauma survivors or people with
'repeating myself'
mental illnesses, artists can fall under the Art Brut umbrella if they
meet more than one of the following criteria: Their illness or trauma (BEVERLY KAYE
influences their work; they are self-taught; they do not participate in GALLERY)
the "mainstream art world"; they create prolifically; and they often
use found, or given, material for their media.
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All of this creates a fundamental problem for Art Brut artists,
Again, The Dude
according to Sesow, who says that Art Brut is more a phase in an
Abides
artist's career than a movement. He makes the point that if an Art
Bruce Lee Still
Brut artist has any talent, he or she will eventually learn the
Rules The Roost
fundamentals by creating. If an artist has experienced trauma or is
For Foliage, It's
living with a mental illness, the art heals it. Finally, if an Art Brut
Wait Till Next Year
artist starts deriving an income from the work, he or she cannot
Morley Doesn't
avoid baptism into the invasive art world - Art Brut or not.
Play It Safe At
Twain House
"I don't consider myself part of the old Outsider or Art Brut
movements. I don't know what label I am. ... I just know I like to do
It Was Only A
it. It challenges the hell out of me, and I'm going to keep doing it,"
Kiss ... Or Was It?
Sesow says.
"I don't know where the Brut or Outsider movements are headed. I RELATED
suppose desire to make a lot of money from the living painters will
eventually spell the downfall of the movement," he says.
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"Regardless of the label, people will continue to use art to heal and from CareerBuilder
express themselves."
The Collector
Walk into the home of Beverly Kaye, one of Connecticut's premier
Art Brut collectors and curators, and you walk into a gallery of raw
art. Works by Sesow; Maurice Hansen, a deceased New Haven
painter who had schizophrenia; and Clyde Angel, an Iowa scrap
metal sculptor with schizophrenia, compete for every bit of wall
space not already occupied by other Outsider Art creations.
"I've been collecting since college," Kaye explains, as she pulls out
a large sheet of butcher paper filled with miniature caricatures of
patients in mental hospital. "When we're children, we're taught to
draw in the lines, use certain colors. In this art, the talent and the
creativity we had as children hasn't been squashed. The early stuff
is still there."
Kaye, who studied special education and fine art at Syracuse
University, explains how she finds the artists she represents. She
will stop at a flea market or a remote weather-beaten store along a
lazy stretch of highway. Occasionally she will take the call of a
mental health clinician impressed by something from a patient's art
therapy session. Quite frequently, she just stops at a table on the
street, which is how she discovered Sesow in Georgetown, then a
software engineer at IBM pulling in close to six figures a year.

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Though Kaye no longer represents Sesow, she has kept some of
his artwork. Some of her current favorites - and clients - are
Alexandra Huber, a German artist whose small mixed media
drawings, mostly of childlike "head-footer" people, reflect the
puzzling order of life circumstances, and Paul Pitt, a factory worker
who paints about 12 historically inspired, almost Puritan looking, oil
canvases a year.

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"In every one, he paints a little black boy wearing a red scarf - that's
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his signature," Kaye says. "He used to paint each one over and over
obsessively. I told him, `Paul, you're never going to finish them if
you keep doing that."
Once Kaye finds an aspiring, self-taught artist, the door to the Art
Brut world swings wide open. As in the established art world, the
first step in the process is entrance into the shows: Chicago's Intuit
Show of Folk and Outsider Art in the fall and New York's Outsider
Art Fair every January, where all of the best-selling Art Brut artists
started. Next comes a residency in an Art Brut-approved gallery,
followed by an ad or better yet, an article in Raw Vision or The
Outsider magazines, the Art Brut journals of record.
Once the paintings start selling, Kaye says collectors keep coming
back for more, often for work from the same artist. For all her
connections and promotion, Kaye takes half of a painting's selling
price, but she says that working with Art Brut artists, depending on
the mental conditions of some, isn't always easy. She recently
ended the representation of one artist because of his demanding,
and sometimes threatening, e-mails.
"I help many artists, who often don't want the world at their
doorstep, bring their art to people who wouldn't normally see it,"
says Kaye. "I don't want to sell the art because a person is
schizophrenic or manic depressive or traumatized in some way. I
want to sell the painting.
Institutionalization
Sesow says not all art in the tradition of Art Brut is created by
people with mental health diagnoses, but the movement certainly
has roots in mental institutions. Beginning in the 1920s, European
psychiatrist Dr. Hans Prinzhorn began noticing something
interesting in the work of their patients when they were handed
paper, pen and paint, and it began to appeal to him. He started
collecting thousands of works, then wrote the book "Bildernerei der
Geisteskranken" ("Artistry of the Mentally Ill"), which distinctly
influenced the contemporary and Surrealist artists, including
Dubuffet.
The French painter and several other artists, including Andre
Breton, formed the "Compagnie de l'Art Brut" in 1948, a collective in
which the artists believed that innovative art should "bypass the
Renaissance," according to Raw Vision magazine, "and return to a
much earlier tradition of art dictated by ideas rather than by
appearance." Dubuffet also sought out works of extreme
individuality by untrained creators for his own personal collection,
the "Collection de l'Art Brut," which he eventually sent to America in
the hopes of finding it a home.
That never materialized. But the city of Lausanne,
Switzerland, eventually agreed to house it. The Collection de l'Art
Brut, or Art Brut Museum, is now one of the most popular art
museums in Europe.
With the advent of psychiatric medications, however, far fewer
people live their lives in psychiatric hospitals, and far less artwork is
discovered. But there are still those who find a way to create.
New Haven's Van Gogh
Like Van Gogh, Maurice Hansen, who had schizophrenia, spent
time in mental institutions. But unlike the peripatetic Vincent, he
created the majority of his large-scale paintings and wall murals in
his hometown, New Haven. Throughout his 40-year career, the selftaught artist painted thousands of canvases, each depicting dozens
of interlocking mythical scenes and popular story tales.
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While Van Gogh's artwork achieved notoriety after his death from
the complications of a suicide attempt, Hansen, who named his
earless cat Vincent, became the poster artist for the American Art
Brut movement during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s
before he died of leukemia in 2000 - an illness exacerbated by his
fear of treatment.
In retrospect, Hansen fits Sesow's mold of Art Brut artist: "an artist
who evolved, who used the art to heal and who eventually
transcended the label."
Though he started in the outsider shows, beginning in 1992, the
mainstream art world took notice of Hansen's work. Lincoln Center's
Cork Gallery displayed his 8- by 30-foot mural "Coney Island" in
1995, and he held retrospectives throughout the Northeast. One of
Hansen's paintings hangs in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of
Art. It is simply signed "Maurice" and, like every one of his paintings,
includes a depiction of the earless feline Vincent - his true imprint.
New Incarnation?
Sesowhas probably outgrown the Art Brut scene, though some of
his paintings still evoke trauma, and he continues to paints
obsessively.
"Beverly [Kaye] first associated my work into the Art Brut genre, and
I went with it. I figured I had to keep painting disability issues and
keep going to these shows, which were just bringing me down,"
says Sesow, though he acknowledges Kaye's help and says the two
still have an amiable relationship. "I still do some disability painting,
but I'm past that; I have tackled social problems such as 9/11, the
wars in Iraq, divorce and disabled soldiers through my paintings.
"I feel my purpose as a painter is to document the times I've lived
through ... the personal and the societal."
Sesow suggests he might have developed a more modern variation
of Art Brut by selling his work almost exclusively from his website
and working outside the traditional gallery system. Surrounded in
his studio by miniature busts of the Communist hero Vladimir Lenin,
he wants to teach emerging artists how to escape the Art Brut
system.
Kaye waffles when it comes to defining Sesow as an Art Brut artist,
but she also believes the "umbrella has become too large." In the
end, however, both agree it's still all about the work.
"In 50 years, people will forget the stories behind the paintings and
the sculptures, and they will probably look at them as fine art," she
says.
For more on Matt Sesow's work, visit the website www.sesow.com.

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