Outsider Environments Europe

unknown photographer (picture made available

by Zangrossi's daughter to the Allogi Barbario weblog )

Venice has a lot of creative and artistic constructs which are admired by people from all over the world.

It also once had a site that was very loved and admired by the locals: the casa delle girandole, the house with the pinweels.

Life and work

Up to now little has been published on the internet about Donato Zangrossi (1905 - 1992), the man who has decorated the exterior of his house in the Campo Castelforte quarter of Venice with small colored wooden items and a large number of sefl-constructed colorful pinwheels.

He probably has begun decorating the facade in the sixties, untill in the eighties the exterior had become fully equipped with his self-constructed wooden items and pinwheels.

example of small wooden items in the decoration

After Zangrossi had died, in 1992, the decorations have no longer been cared for. The following picture, a screenprint from a 1995 video (see documentation), shows the facade as it was quite soon after its author had passed away.

Growing interest

Recently, in relation with the Italian costruttori di babele project, interest in Zangrossi's creation and comparable ones in the Veneto region has increased.

Giada Carraro, correspondent of the project, already wrote a thesis about the site, is active in collecting information and documentation about it and in general promotes interest in arte irregolari, inter alia by organizing conferences, such as one about the Casa Bepi Suá on Burano (end may 2013).

Documentation
* Article (april 6, 2013) in a local newspaper La Nuova (in italian)
* Article (april 7, 2013) in another local newspaper, about the costruttori di babele project (in italian)
* Video "Il nonno bambino",1995, Acadamy of Fine Arts, Venice (two students researching the site)

Donato Zangrossi

Casa delle girandole

Rio Frescada

Campo Castelforte

Venezia, IT

no longer extant

picture courtesy of Rafa Castells

Recently, I several times have updated my original post (January 9, 2009) about Josep Pujiula, who since the eighties has been active in constructing an outsider art environment on the banks of the Fluvia river near the community of Argelaguer in Catalonia, Spain.

Local authorities early 2012 have decided that the high-rising wooden structures were not safe, especially in the case of fire, and ordered the dismantling of these constructs.

Next video (may 10, 2012), a news item on Catalonian tv, shows Pujiula busy in tearing down the structures (fragment starts at 2'40").

March 2013 an international petition has been organized to ask the local authorities to save the site, at least those parts of it with constructs like ponds, fountains and sculptures, made mainly from solid materials like steel and concrete.

Now it appears that on April 3, 2013 the Agència Catalana de l'Aigua (the Catalonian water authority) has ruled that all still existing constructs should be removed, so that the area along the river returns to its original state.

Inhabitants from Argalaguer and other interested parties have issued a Manifest (May 13, 2013), to save the site.

The Manifest (translated into english) says:

1. The Argelaguer cabins constitute an architectural, cultural and social heritage with a great beauty and sentimental value

(click here to read the full text, as republished in OEE-texts)

panel presenting Chatelain's Humoristic Garden

pictures courtesy of Marie-José Georges, director Palais Idéal

From May 10th untill October 31 2013 the Palais Idéal has an outdoor exposition, presenting highlights of art brut, a project by its director Marie-José Georges in cooperation with Sarah Lombardi, director of the Collection d'Art Brut, Lausanne, and Laurent Danchin, art historian and specialist in the field of art environments.

Displayed on panels of some 50x50 cm, as in above image, the exposition will introduce the visitors of the Palais Idéal to twenty-seven art brut artists and thirteen creators of art environments.

Focussing in this note in particular on environments, the topic of this blog, it is good to establish that Laurent Danchin in selecting the examples, has opted to show creations from several countries, in this way indicating the international dimension of the field, while he also shows various states of preservation, some extant, some in danger or abandonned.

another panel with Chomo's village of preludian art

The exposition has international toppers such as Nek Chand's Rock Garden(India) and Sabato (Simon) Rodia's Watts Towers (USA) and famous artists from Canada ("anarchitect" Richard Greaves), Finland (Veijo Rönkkönen) and Spain (Josep Pujiula i Vila).

France is represented by its three best known sites, Cheval's Palais Idéal, Isidore's Maison Picassiette and Abbé Fouré's Sculpted Rocks, supplemented with the environments created by Chomo, Fernand Chatelain, Marcel Dhièvre, Jean Linard and Robert Tatin.

The Palais Idéal hosting thousands of visitors each year, this exposition is a praiseworthy contribution to dissiminating information to the general public about outsider artists and art environments, topics that so far sparsely get attention by the mainstream media and the mainstream art world.

Documentation
The exhibition features a brochure in which all panels are included

I have updated my post of april 24, 2013, about Pietro Moschini, adding that this month (may 2013) a photo-booklet about Moschini has appeared, edited and published by Pavel Konecny.

Konecny, a collector of outsider art from the Czech Republic, by chance came along pictures of Moschini's work, published on the internet by tourists, who had visited the self-taught artist in his home in Tuscania. It was a discovery with a major impact, resulting in the opening of Moschini's house as a Casa-Museo, thus doing justice to an hitherto unknown artist.

In the introduction to his book (in czech, italian and english), Konecny not only relates this story, he also has a biographical sketch of the artist and a first artistic appreciation of his work, recommending there is every reason for an art historian to delve into Moschini's life and work and produce a comprehensive study.

However, almost seventy of the hundred pages of the book, have photographs by Konecny of Mochini's sculptures, both pictures of the various locations were Moschini has resided (houses in and outside Tuscania) and pictures of free standing sculptures in wood, porous concrete, stone, cork and gypsum.

These pictures give a wonderful impression of Moschini's creative talent..

The photo-book (16x23 cm) is self-published and since it has a limited edition, I would recommend those interested in outsider art and art environments to take timely action in ordering a copy (10 euro + postage), by writing to the author via his email adress konecny.p(at)raz-dva.cz

Dompnac is a small community of some 80 inhabitants in the southern Ardèche in France, a territory that in terms of landscape is part of the Cévennes.

Touristic sites recommend the area around the community because if its magnificent and wild setting. In the midst of this one will find a very special creative construct: the miniature village of le Ron des Fades, the fairies rock.

this picture and the next ones courtesy of Stephanie Booth

(Climb to the Stars weblog)

Created by Pierre Bouvarel, a retired farmer, about whom the internet has virtually no biographical data, this ensemble of miniature buildings, on scale 1:12, is a tribute to the traditional, artisinal way of constructing houses and other buildings in this part of the country.

In the Cévennes the stones that cover the roofs, mainly are slices of schist (lauzes) and a special technique is required to arrange them in such a way that they provide good protection aginst the rain.

In his constructs Bouvarel demonstrates the simple beauty of roofs made from lauzes, like other creative people from the area, united in the association Sur le sentier des lauzes (On the trail of lauzes), in their own way have shown the artistic potential of this material.

The houses and the other builded constructs of the site, such as a church and a bridge, have been modeled on existing structures in Dompnac and the surrounding Valley of the Drobie River.

This miniature village can be visited by the public in the summermonths.

Documentation
* Ron des Fades blogspot
* Pictures (june 2006) by Stephanie Booth on Flickr

Pierre Bouvarel
Le ron des fades
07620 Dompnac
open for public visits 1/5-1/11

Ron des Fades weergeven op een grotere kaart

The Association of friends of Abbé Fouré's oeuvre has been rather active this spring (2013).

Stimulated by the association, the exhibition l'Art Brut à l'Ouest (Brest, Musée des Beaux Arts) opened in april, featuring the photographs of Gilles Ehrmann and the creations of Abbé Fouré and Per Jain.

And in may a booklet has been published about life and work of the priest, who became famous because of the sculptures he carved in the rocks on Rothéneuf's seaside. Written by the association's president, Joëlle Jouneau, and entitled l'Ermite de Rothéneuf, this publication offers a biography of Adolphe Fouré (1839-1910) and has a description and assessment, based on the insights so far, of his creative activity.

Fouré's life and work for long time have been surrounded by frills and legends. Only lately an attempt is made to figure out the truth and this book contributes to this.

Just some examples:
* it has been related that Fouré, when he was the rector of Paimpont, travelled to England to ask the owners of the lcoal forges to refrain from the phased closing of these forges (cf Noguette, 1919); recent research in english archives so far has not confirmed this;
*it also has been related, that Fouré in 1893 had to terminate his activities as a priest because he had become deaf and suffered from a stroke; in this respect the archives reveal that the priest in a local dispute took position against the authorities, after which he was dismissed from his office by the leadership of the church.

The book also has a review, as closely as possible given the available knowledge, of Fouré's creations, both the ones in and around his house and the ones carved in the rocks..Since there still are many questions, this is an ungoing project.

This litlle book, 12 x 17.5 cm, 64 pages, richly illustrated with old postcards, can be ordered at Libraire La Procure (euro 6.50 + postage, Paypal availale).

screenprint from the museum's website

This summer (2013) the Palais Idéal, the famous environment made between 1879 and 1912 by Joseph-Ferdinand Cheval, will be featured in Brussels.

Annex to the summer exhibition, with works from its collection, the Musée art) & (marges, has made available two of its rooms to exhibit photographs of Cheval's creation, a project in cooperation with the Palais Idéal in Hauterives, France.

Opening june 12, the exhibition can be visisted untill september 8.

Musée art) & (marges

Hoogstraat/rue Haute 312-314

1000 Brussel/Bruxelles

website of the museum

This year (2013) the Europen Outsider Art Association had its annual general assembly end may in Heidelberg at the Prinzhorn Institute. The main theme for this meeting was "Ethical questions in outsider art".

Eva de Stefano, professor of the history of contemporary art at the University of Palermo introduced this issue with a lecture entitled: Who owns outsider art? Illegal monuments: ownership and difficult protection, illustrating the issue with some examples from Sicily: the street art of Giovanni Bosco and the outsider environments of Bentivegna, Cammarata and Israele.

She began thus: "The topic I want to cover and propose for discussion is particularly complex and concerns the fate of those special works that are difficult to classify, that is to say environments: outsider environmental works.....".(Click here to read the rest of the text)

During the Assembly the first ever meeting was held of a group, formed under the aupices of the EOA, the Interest Group of Environments.

I see this as an important development: for the first time on the european level a committee has been formed that can deal with the various aspects of outsider art environments, such as documenting, authorizing, sustainable use, protecting and communicating. (Click here to read the conclusions of the meeting).

In support of the group's communication I launched a new public Facebook page about outsider environments.

screenprint

All the years I have been researching documentation about outsider environments, I did not come along a referral to a movie made in 1977, entitled Les demeures imaginaires, untill some days ago I saw the announcement of an evening with open air cinema on July 6th, 2013, at the Art Brut Museum, Lausanne.

French art critic and expert of art brut Laurent Danchin will host the evening and he sure will have interesting details to share, both about the makers of the films and the creators of environments portrayed in these films.

Les demeures imaginaires is a remarkable production, presenting the Watts Towers by Simon Rodia, the Junker Haus of Karl Junker and the Maison Picassiette by Raymond Isidore

The film, composed in 1975, probably has been shot on 16 mm color film, which makes it for our nowadays eyes, used as we have become to digital processing, a bit blurry and old-fashioned. It has an introduction with elements (children being creatively active, the facade of the Mercery castle) that are only partly relevant to its main story. Of course, these are just matters of form.

What makes the film really remarkable, in my opinion, is the circumstance that all contributions to it have been made by psychiatrists.

Three psychiatrists contributing

The part about Simon Rodia (starting at 4'00") has been provided by Irene Jakab (1919-2011), a psychiatrist of Pittsburgh University, cofounder of SIPE, the Société Internationale de Psychopathologie de l'Expression et d´art-thérapie. In this field she has published Drawings and printings of mental patients, Budapest, 1956, later re-edited as Pictorial Expression in Psychiatry, Budapest, 1998.

I came along a note saying that Jakab in 1971 presented a film about the Watts Towers. It is unclear to me if the part in Les demeures imaginaires is equal to this one.

The part about Karl Junker (starting at 8'28") has been provided by Kurt Behrends, a german psychiatrist from Dùsseldorf. The film has been sponsored by the Psychiatrische Abteilung des Institutes fùr Lebensberatung Stadt Dùsseldorf (Psychiatric department of the institute for counseling in existental questions). I couldn't trace any info about some special relation of dr Behrend with Karl Junker's creation.

The third part, about Raymond Isidore (starting at 17'30") has been provided by Gaston Ferdière (1907-1990) who in the film is credited as the one who proposed the concept of the film.

Ferdière was a psychiatrist, who liked the arts, wrote poetry and participated in surrealist circles in the Paris of the nineteen thirties, later to become doctor at the psychiatric hospital in Rodez in southern France.. One of his patients was Antonin Artaud, and the way Ferdière treated him raised a lot of controversy.

screenprint

Changing role of psychiatry

In the late 18th and early 19th century western psychiatrists like Lombroso, Morgenthaler, Prinzhorn, Meunier and Marie have been important in identifying and studying creative talents of inmates of their institutions. By collecting their works and publishing books about them, they laid a foundation on which after WWII Dubuffet established his realm of art brut.

But the times they are achanging. In the nineteen seventies new medicines became available for psychiatric patients and large psychiatric institutions were closed, patients henceforth living in small units or getting care by outpatient treatment. Nowadays small scale studios provide an opportunity for psychiatric patients to be creatively active.

Am I wrong in supposing that above developments implicate that contemporary psychiatry no longer is present with regard to discussing developments in outsider art and outsider environments, and correspondently. also no longer is seen as an interesting interlocutor by those who nowadays lead the debate (art historians, curators, social scientists) ?

If so, this could explain why during all those years I never saw a referral to the Les demeures imaginaires movie.

What I consider as a pity. Because this film by Eric Duvivier, dated in its design as it may be, has quite instructive scenes of some outstanding outsider environments. And also because, in retrospect, this film might be seen as a last tribute to a bygone era, a landmark that underscores the departure of psychiatry from the discussion about outsider art/outsider environments.

Les demeures imaginaires (1975, 28'59")

Edited by Eric Duvivier

Laboratoire Sandoz, Basel, Switzerland

this and the next two pictures (2006) published

with permission of the "archives départementales du Cantal"

Above picture, courtesy of the departmental archives of Cantal, shows the decorated garden of René Delrieu (1930-2008), who lived in the small community of Ally in the Auvergne area in France.

Delrieu was a blacksmith, who later in life became a mechanic of agricultural machinery.

Affter his retirement, around 1994, he began embellishing the garden in front of his house. He made installations and sculptures from sheet metal, and added frescoes to the exterior wall of the house, such as the scene on the picture below that depicts a shoe smith at work.

A number of his creations have been performed two-dimensional, using sheet-metal, such as the scene of a horse race, painted in lively colors and attached to the wired fence of the garden.

This small, but enjoyable ensemble can no longer be viewed in situ. After Delrieu died and his house was sold, the collection found its way to various interested parties, among whom the Musée de Veinazès, located in La Capelle-del-Fraisse.

This private museum in the Auvergne area some ten years ago has been founded by Raymond Coste in order to exhibit his collection of traditional agricultural machinery and utensils used in tradional crafts.

His son Bernard Coste, who partners his father in running the museum, is quite interested in folk and irregular art, so the museum recently has opened a new department with creations in this field.

It nowadays exhibits part of René Delrieu's creations. Bernard Coste also took care to make pictures of the Delrieu site (in 2006), a collection he donated to the archives of the Cantal department.

A wonderful new acquistition of the museum, enriching this department, is the collection of wooden replica's of old buildings, wash hooses, churches, rows of houses, etc. made during the last twenty years by Robert Goudergues.

moodel of a row of traditional houses in Aurillac

picture via the Facebook page of the Museum

Above story shows (and is a tribute to) the potential on a regional level of private parties being active in safeguarding artistic, artisinal and traditonal heritage.

Documentation/more pictures

* Facebook page of the museum

* Weblog of Bruno Montpied (june 2013), with a text about the museum and a text about René Delrieu (with more pictures)

René Delrieu

Jardin décoré

Ally, Cantal, FR

no longer extant, but part of the creations exhibited in:

Musée de Veizanès

Lacaza

15120 La Capelle-del-Fraisse, Auvergne, FR

On the premises of the site La Cathédrale de Jean Linard this summer (2013) there will be an exposition that features outsider artists from Italian descent who made art environments, both some born and living in Italy, amd some born in Italy but living and working in France.

This exposition is for one part a reprise of the one that was held in october 2012 in Rome, focussing upon Giovanni Cammarata, Luigi Lineri and Bonaria Manca, for another part it highlights Luigi Buffo, Joseph Donadello and the sculptor Joseph Barbiero.

Organized by the association Patrimoines Irréguliers de France in cooperation with the Italian group Costruttori di Babele, the exposition can be seen in july and september.

In connection with this event I published in OEE Texts a review of Italian born outsiders creating art environments in France

Costruttori di Babele, bâtisseurs Italiens d'univers insolites
Cathédrale de Jean Linard
Les Poteries
18250 Neuvy-les-deux-clochers, FR
july and 7-29 september 2013 (sater/sundays)

pictures from the website Empreinte d'Art

Il les avait vus....He had seen them.........

Charles Clave (1920-1998), nicknamed Charlot, from the french community of Frasne-le-Chateau, claimed he had an astral contact with aliens, whose likeness he captured in homemade sculptures in a naive style.

Life and works

Probably all his life Clave has lived in Frasne-le-Chateau, in any case he lived there with his mother in a house on the rue des Grandse Vergers, later living there alone following the death of his mother.

He had various jobs, being a cultivator, then following a training to become a police officer, a job he waived to become a postman, later changing to a job as a mason.

Biographical details are sketchy, so it is unclear when Clave began making his sculptures. I presume it may have been in the eighties of the former century.

All together he has made some twenty sculptures of aliens, which he exposed in the sleeping room, around his centrally located bed. This ensemble of sculptures, a mini art environment, locally became known as "Musée Charlot", and as far as I understand it could be visisted by the public on sunday afternoons.

Following Clave's death, the house has been sold. It nowadays is owned by Christine Péquignol, who has an art gallery on the premises, named Empreinte d'Art (Art's Footprint). Both by a plaque on the facade and by a page on the gallery's website, the memory of Charles Clave is being kept alive.

As far as I understand the city hall of Frasne-le-Chateau takes care of (part of?) the sculptures.

Documentation

* Website of Empreinte d'Art

* Article in regional journal La Presse de Gray, july 2009, about the art gallery, with references to Clave (in french)

* French cultural magazine Création Franche, no 5, 1992 (out of my reach), has an article about Clave

Charles Clave

Musée Charlot

17 rue des Grands Vergers

70700 Frasne-le-Chateau, Franche-Comté area, FR

site no longer extant

pictures are screenprints from Serflac's video

(see documentation)

Yiorgos Chavaledakis's stone construction is an ensemble of buildings, structures and sculptures made

from stones, varying in shape, color and size, as collected by Yiorgos in the neighbouring mountains.

Located in the community of Kalyves, near Chania, on Crete, the site is named Koumos, a greek term to denote a shed with a typical form, as depicted in the next picture, showing the one made by Chavaledaki.

Starting to make his creation in 1990, Chavaledakis, about whom the internet has no biographic details, has been working on it for over ten years. The complex of structures accommodate a greek tavern and restaurant, where large numbers of guests can be welcomed.

The building whch houses the tavern is lavishly decorated with stones, in the same way as the chapel on the site, as shown below.

Yiorgos' creative talent is also reflected in various stand alone sculptures ....

.... mosaic decorated images ....

and frescoes in high relief on the walls.

Documentation/more pictures
* The official Koumos website (in greek)
* Koumos on Facebook
* Page on the Netilios website, in french, review and pictures
* Video by Serflac (Youtube, 4'01". uploaded july 2013)

Yiorgos Chavaledakis
Koumos
Kalyves
730073 Chania, Crete
open to the public that visits the tavern

Grotere kaart weergeven

all pictures courtesy of Thierry Bucquoy,

from his weblog *

Like the stories of so many outsider environments, what follows is a story of transcience.

Life and works

Written in Occitan, a language descendant of latin as spoken in the Roman empire and traditionally the language used in southern France, the name of this cabin refers to the former profession of its owner: operator of the mill of Rochevideau, a community located in a rural part of the Perigord

Having managed the mill for many years, Marcel Debord (1909-1994), in his early fifties got such problems with his legs that he had to decide to finish this job.

Beginning a new life, nearby the mill, around a small cabin he probably used as a workshop, he gradually covered the premises with a variety of decorative, mainly iron items and single-handedly made sculptures from concrete.

The decorative items included horse hoes, all kinds of iron utensils and various other iron elements, like spoons and forks, decoratively attached to a concrete plate.

Debord made his sculptures from concrete, using molds. He would mainly depict small animals from the area where he grew up and where he lived, such as a snail, a pigeon, an owl, or a swan, as in the picture below.

All together a bestiary of familiar animals...

Living alone, these small constructs may have been special to Debord.

As Thierry Bucquoy in his blog says:

Les animaux poussent comme des fleurs

Il suffit de les arroser,

De les apprivoiser pour en faire des amis

Partenaire de sa solitude

The animals grow like flowers

Just sprinkle them,

Tame them, to turn them into friends

Partners of his solitude

But then Debord also has made a small number of sculptures of people, impersonations which also refer to his homeland , such as a peasant woman near a well, a fisherman, a hunter, a miller....

Debord may have been active in creating this environment for some thirty years. However, as far as I know, during his life he has got no publicity in France on a national level.

Bruno Montpied visited him in 1992, but (justly) hesitated to publish Debord's whereabouts, because of his poor health. Years later, in his Ëloge des jardins anarchiques (2011) the author has reported vividly about his visit to the site and his meeting with Debord.

Debord died in 1994 and following his death the site has been left uncared for. In 1999 a big storm, which struck down a lot of trees, has demolished most of the site too.

Documentation/more pictures
* Jean-Luc Thuilier, Arts et singuliers d'art en Périgord, Savignac-les-Églises (Ed. Gold), 2007
* Bruno Montpied, "Les cabanes du meunier Debord. Un jardinier d'outils", in: Éloge des jardins anarchiques, p. 87-93. Montreuil-sur-Bois (l'Insomniaque), 2011
* Weblog "le blog de Thierry B."

Marcel Debord
Lou cabanou d'ou mounié
Rochevideau FR

site no longer extant

note

* Thierry Bucquoy and his partner Maryline live in Ligueux, in the Përigord area. Their garden Le jardin des délices, regularly houses art expositions. In his weblog Thierry writes about gardens, art, artists, and a variety of other subjects

pictures courtesy of Sophie Lepetit, from her weblog

Lamasquère is a community of some 1300 inhabitants, southwest of Toulouse, in southern France.

Located near the hustle and dense housing of the big city, this is quite, rural area, with detached houses, in general standing on relatively large plots of flat land.

Life and works

Roger Lemière (b. 1938) in 1984 began creating rather naturalistic sculptures of animals, an activity resulting over the years in a collection of some sixty items, scattered over the grounds around the house. .

Not fabricated by using cement, but by using resin, the life-sized sculptures for a part depict wild-life animals, like a giraffe, a rhinoceros, an elephant, a zebra, and the like.

However, Lemière has created smaller species too, such as deer, monkeys, ibises..... .

Dotted with so many animals, the flat and relatively vast area around the house evoked an atmosphere of an African savanne, which was accentuated by the presence of a scene with a few traditionally portrayed African natives in front of a hut..

Lemière. however, has never travelled to Africa and he has no special affection with that part of the world.

Like other creators of bestiaries (Bastouil, Diaz, Hardy, Vriet), he apparently just has been inspired by the concept of visualizing species of the animal kingdom, focussing as a matter of course on those present in the collective western perception of fauna.

The collection has been disposed off in 2013

End 2012 it has become known via Sophie Lepetit's weblog, that Lemière has decided to dispose off his collection. The sculptures have been delivered to someone in France who might exhibit them in one or the other setting, unknown at this time.

Who knows what some day the public might get to see.....

Documentation/more pictures

* More information and pictures (2012) on Sophie Lepetit's weblog, november 27 2012, november 28 2012, november 29 2012

* An earlier note (2008) in Bruno Montpied's weblog

Roger Lemière
l'Afrique
3131600 Lamasquère FR

from around 2013 onwards no longer extant

picture licensed under
Creative Commons (Gotardo González)

This house in Los Santos de Maimona (Extramadura, Spain) is a marvel of form and decoration.

Life and works

Francisco González Grajera (b. 1935) in 1989, so when he was in his fifties, began constructing a (second) house on a plot of land in the outskirts of the community of Los Santos de Maimona. From his eighteenth he had worked as a mason in construction, so he was no stranger to building a house.

this picture, and the next ones, are

screenprints from the Capricho de Cotrina video below

To please one of his daughters, he said he would attempt to make it a fairytale one.

In some drawings, which have been preserved, he sketched how the house would look like, its most important characteristic being its one and all round shapes.

Indeed, the structure, that currently is largely completed, has almost exclusively round shapes.

But there is a second element that makes the construction particular.

Grajera has abundantly decorated interior and exterior with brightly colored mosaic, mainly derived from broken plates.(pique assiette, trecadis)

In Spain this almost immediately implies associations with Gaudi. However, Grajera has said he had never heard of Gaudi, not at school, not later, when he was a bricklayer.

Having visited Barcelona in later years, Grajera very much liked Gaudi's creations, but as he said, Gaudi did not, as he himself, have to pile stones and to fit the decorative mosaics.

When he still had his job, Grajera would be active in constructing the house in the evenings, the weekends and in his free time, once retired he would be engaged full time..

Meanwhile the site has become well known, also because of articles in Spanish journals and programs on tv.

However, since Grajera does not qualify as an architect, the authorities of the community raise formal questions, although they might see the site's cultural, artistic and touristic value.

As far as I understand, Grajera has plans to legate the Capricho de Cotrina to the community, to operate it as a cultural centre.

Documentation, more pictures

* Official website

* Entry on SPACES website, with a wealth of pictures

* Video (Youtube, 7'55", by Capricho de Cotrina, uploaded nov 2012)

Francisco Gozález Grajera

El capricho de Cotrina

Los santos de maimona, ES

can be visited, see official website

view from the ex-101 highway

Capricho de Catrino weergeven op een grotere kaart

pictures by Inky van Swelm

Very occasionally it happens that someone who at a young age creates fairy tale characters, sees his creative activities result in a venue for public entertainment. This blog has Frantisek Jáich from the Czech Republic as an example.

Now here is the story of Wim de Vries from the Netherlands.

Life and works

De Vries, who lived in the community of Enkhuizen, had a job as a house painter and he run a hobby shop, where he sold children's furniture he himself would decorate with gnomes and mushrooms.

In the early nineteen seventies he began creating gnomes and fairytale characters, as in above pictures, which he would display in a stall on local touristic summer markets, organized by the Enkhuizen association of shopkeepers.

The 1973 touristic market was a landmark in de Vries' creative career, because in that year he presented kind of a mini town of self-constructed small wooden houses, peopled with gnomes and fairy tale characters, all together a mini creative environment and an amusement park in the making.

The concept proved successful, the mini fairy town travelled to other touristic markets in the country, it developped in the late nineteen-seventies into a summer festivity in a large tent in an Enkhuizen parking lot and in 1981 it got a permanent location in a public park in Enkhuizen, where it stayed untill 1990.

Amidst a residential area, this was no fortunate location for the ever growing amusement park, that attracted many buses with schoolchildren, so in 1991 the city provided a new location in a recreation area just outside the city center, initially 2.5 ha (6.2 acres), then growing to the nowadays 7.5 ha (18.5 acres)

nowadays acces square with mini houses

Nowadays "Fairy Wonderland" offers its young visitors animated scenes of all famous european fairy tales, it has a fairy castle, a children ranch, a maze, attractions such as small boats and little trains. No large scale roller-coasters and the like. All in accordance with children's world of imagination.

Currently (2013) Wim de Vries is still present daily at the site, but the enterprise is run by his son Mathijs.

Consistent with the genesis of the park, all new scenes and characters are developed, created and manufactured in-house.

a replica of one of Wim de Vries' first creations

watches with a smile the hustle and bustle

Documentation/more pictures
* The official website (in dutch)
* The Facebook page (in dutch)

Sprookjeswonderland
Kooizandweg 9
1601 LK Enkhuizen NL
open in summer and around Christmas

Sprookjeswonderland weergeven op een grotere kaart

all pictures courtesy of the Polyana Skazok Museum

:Located north of Yalta on the Crimea peninsula in Ukraine, Polyana Skazok is an outdoor museum of over 300 sculptures, all relating to fairies and folk tales *.

Nowadays a top amusement park in Ukraine, it has its origins in a simple fairy tale garden, created by a self-taught artist, Pavel Bezrukov **.

Life and works

Born in 1890, Bezrukov, who lived in Mocow, had a career as an engineer in the oil industry. When in the nineteen thirties he got tuberculosis, he moved to the Crimea to seek recovery. Staying on various locations, he would finally settle in a green, mountainous area north of Yalta, where he recovered from his illness.

Bezrukov with his two daughters (?)
and the head of the giant

It is not clear when Bezrukov as a self-taught artist began making wooden sculptures. Probably it was at some moment after he returned home after the world war II, so at a time he already was in his late fifties or early sixties.

Anyway, during the nineteen fifties Bezrukov made such a number of wooden sculptures, he exposed around his house, that in the year 1960 the Fairy Tale Garden more or less officially came into being as a point of interest for the public.

Taras Bulba, main character from Nicolai Gogol's novella

The fairy tale garden soon became famous, developing into a place being visited by a lot of peope, both locals and tourists on holiday in Yalta.

Children were happy to come and learn the stories from folklore and fairies, as represented by the various sculptures.

Vasilisa the beautiful, a russian folk tale

The black and white pictures, from the collection of the current museum, give an impression of the kind of wooden sculptures Bezrukov made: Tara Bulba, Vasilisa the beautiful, and of course Baba Yaga (her hut was also present on the premises), Pinocchio.....

sculpture entitled Черный триумвират, black triumvirate

The fairy tale garden has been in existence for ten years. In 1970 it has been destroyed for reasons I couldn't fully figure out.

Public opinion, however, did not accept the disappearance of the garden and the city of Yalta could not but decide to establish a new fairy tale garden on the premises of the former one.

The new garden would have sculptures and constructs made by various professional sculptors, from the then USSR.

Pavel Bezrukov took no part in these developments. Maybe after the garden was destructed, he moved to another house in Yalta, but It is unclear to me how he continued his life and where and when he died.

screenprint of the home page of the Museum Polyana Skazok

The new fairy tale garden, with today an area of several hectares and over 300 sculptures/sculpture groups, has become one of Ukraine's popular attractions. On the garden's website Bezrukov is payed tribute.

Documentation/more pictures
* Official website of the open air museum (in Ukrainian)
* Article (in english) on website Discover Ukraine
* More pictures (2012) of the current museum on Viola weblog and on the Worldwalk website

notes
* I learned about Bezrukov through a recent post of Bruno Montpied on his weblog
** This blog has two other examples of amusement parks that grew out of activities of a self-taught artist,
Wim de Vries (Netherlands) and Frantisek Jáich (Czech Republic)

Museum Polyana Skazok
Kirova Street
Yalta, Ukraine
open all year, see website

Fairytale garden weergeven op een grotere kaart

all pictures courtesy of Pavel Konecny

The small community of Kruslov, south of Prague, in the Bohemian area of the Czech Republic, houses a very special outsider art environment, with a colorful decorated exterior and an interior with a large variety of woodcarvings, all created by a self-taught artist *.

Life and works

Josef Mach (1929-2009) decided to earn his living as a professional beekeeper, so in 1948 he builded kind of a barn, an apiary, some 25 meters long, where he installed some 65 beehives.

Mach has provided these beehives, like all other buildings on the premises with colorful decorations, mainly in primary colors, depicting in a folkish, but rather personal style facades of houses, barns, and other elements of Czechian social life and historical tradition.

The totality of these decorated beehives and other builded structures on the property has become a festival of colors, which evokes and pays tribute to places of interest and landmarks of the Czech Republic.

Mach was a gifted wood carver too.

Related as he was to the world of bees, he produced a large collection of woodcarved bees.

He would supply elements of his living environment with woodcarved decorations, such as some of the beehives, but also objects in the interior.

However, most of his sculpted legacy includes a large collection of stand-alone works of woodcarving, such as wooden sculptures of saints, woodcarved shrines, various chairs and tables, frames of mirrors and photo displays, all located in the property's living area.

The site is being cared for

After Josef Mach died, probably there were no heirs who could go and live in the house. In order to prevent the interior and exterior collection of outsider art falling into oblivion, an organisation of friends has been formed, which aims to preserve the site for the future. This association already has ensured that necessary repairs have been carried out..

Documentation/more pictures

* Website of the association of friends

note:

* I have been noted to this site by Pavel Konecny, thanks a lot Pavel!

Machuv vcelin

Kruslov 24

38719 Cestice, Czech Republic

can be visited in summermonths, 10-18, except monday

pictures courtesy of Cristine Calicelli

San Daniele Po is a small community of some 1500 inhabitants in the Lombardian regio in Italy.

In a sidetreet of the Strada Provincial 85 that intersects the village, stands a house with an exterior that for years now is being reconstructed and decorated by its inhabitant, Enrico Capra.

Life and work

Capra has been living in this house since he was born in 1934. His youth may have been problematic, his father died from an illness when he was nine years old, it was wartime and the young boy was often ill.

At the age of fourteen he started working as a mason, although he had preferred to become a carpenter.

He never married, and living with his mother in the house, he may have had a somewhat withdrawn life, his main passion becoming decorating and reconstructing the house.

After his mother died, in 1970, and in any case when he became retired, in 1994, he would spend all his time in this creative pasion.

Capra would sculpt terracotta bricks and apply these on the walls, like he also made concrete ornaments.

Using material from demolished houses, he contructed balustrades, balconies and colums, changing the rectilinear forms of the house into more circular ones.

All together, the elements added to the house have redefined it into a place where one can stay in a peaceful atmosphere and feel protected somehow from the outer world.

Documentation/more pictures

*Cristina Calicelli, `Castelli immaginari. Guerion Galzerano, Umberto Bonini, Enrico Capra`, in Costruttori di Babele, Ed. by Gabriele Mina, p. 47-62, Milan (Eléuthera), 2011

* Article on SPACES website (with a lot of pictures by Cristina Calicelli)
* Article on Costruttori di Babele website (in Italian)

Enrico Capra
44 via Cantone
San Daniele Po
can be een from the street

Capra weergeven op een grotere kaart

Donato Zangrossi, Casa delle girandole/The house with the pinwheels

update: Josep Pujiula, save the Argelaguer site

Outdoor exposition at Facteur Cheval's Palais Idéal

update: Pietro Moschini, a photobook by Pavel Konecny

Pierre Bouvarel, Le ron des fades/The fairies rock

update: Abbé Fouré, a booklet by Joëlle Jouneau

Exposition in Brussels features Palais Idéal

General Assembly of the European Outsider Art Association 2013

Les demeures imaginaires/Imaginary dwellings

René Delrieu, Jardin décoré/Decorated garden

Exposition at Cathédrale de Jean Linard

Charles Clave, Musée Charlot/Charlot's Museum

Yiorgos Chavaledakis, ΚΟΥΜΟΣ, ΠΕΤΡΙΝΗ ΚΑΤΑΣΚΕΥΗ/ Koumos, Stone Construction

Marcel Debord, Lou cabanou d'ou mounié/The cabin of the miller

Rogier Lemìère, l'Afrique/Africa

Francisco González Grajera, El capricho de Cotrina/Cotrina's whimsy

Wim de Vries, Sprookjeswonderland/Fairy wonderland

Pavel Bezrukov, Поляна сказок/Fairy tale garden

Josef Mach, Machuv vcelin/Mach's apiary

Enrico Capra, Casa decorata/Decorated house