here is a personal series of images of people and flowers. i’ve been procrastinating finishing them for awhile.
enjoy them! if you like. mhm
John Bunion (J.B.) Murray (1908-1988) was a self-taught artist in Glascock County, Georgia. Murray was an illiterate sharecropper who, after a religious vision while working the fields at the age of 70, produced a remarkable body of abstract paintings in the last decade of his life. His work is now in many important collections, including that of the American Folk Art Museum[1] and the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[2] and has been featured in many museum exhibitions, including “Self-Taught Genius” at AFAM and “When the Stars Begin to Fall” at the Studio Museum.[3]
Murray’s paintings are paradoxical in light of the limitations of his circumstances. Unable to read or write, in his pictures Murray invented a private language of notation, as if it were Adamic script from the late-20th century. While one might expect a septuagenarian sharecropper to create a style in a recognizable local vernacular, Murray’s work, in its heightened color and abstract decorative quality, is comparable to modernist works with a mandarin appeal, by such artists as Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, and Howard Hodgkin, among others.[citation needed][original research?]
Seeing an eagle descend from the sun, Murray believed that he had been granted a privileged religious insight, which was to be the inspiration for his work as an artist.[4] Murray’s revelation at the age of 70, which commenced his career as a painter, gave his work a prophetic intensity, as he believed himself a medium of God.
-Wikipedia
