David Ogilvie lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He worked in an assortment of jobs before he retired, including dishwasher, cook, farmhand, millworker, infantryman, warehouseman, press worker, and janitor. His obsession with drawing began in his 50s, during recovery from a lengthy illness. He taught himself to draw, mainly with ink, and has surrendered to the imperative to create art all day.
Laurie Marshall had always doodled a bit with pencil and paper, but first picked up a paintbrush at an art drop-in center when he was about 50 years old. Marshall grew up in farming country, hence the appearance of cows, horses, and other creatures in his paintings. He applies paint in thick layers and often scratches images through the paint. He uses a palette knife or his hands to work – he doesn’t like paint brushes. Sometimes he has an idea of an image he would like to paint, but usually he just starts painting and good things happen.
Marshall paints on thin pieces of particle board. He signs them “elbo”, which is a nickname he uses for artwork. His life changed dramatically one day when an art collector saw his work; that meeting led to a successful exhibition.
Jahan Maka (1900 – 1987) was born on a farm in Lithuania in 1900. Although the details are unclear, his family lost their farm during WWI, and Maka left for Canada in 1927, hoping to make enough money to return and buy another farm. The Depression thwarted his plans and he worked as a labourer in the Prairie provinces. He eventually settled in Flin Flon, Manitoba.
Maka’s friends recalled him as a bit of a loner, introspective, but sociable with his close circle of friends. Maka began painting at age 68, improvising with his own products like commercial enamels, airplane paint thinned with lighter fluid, appliance touch-up paint, wax crayons, and carpenter’s chalk. He rebuilt worn paint brushes with hairs from his own moustache and painted on walls or doors of his apartment when he ran out of canvas. Motifs that he wanted to recreate, like forests, were carved from wood or linoleum and stamped onto the canvas or board. Later a family member encouraged him to paint and supplied him with professional art supplies.
Art critic, Michael D. Hall, holds Maka in high regard as one of the great symbolists.
McKay started out as a mime artist and never lost his flair for the theatrical. He took a fundamental art course in his youth but found it too academic and boring. Instead, he taught himself to draw by studying the old masters.
The brilliance of McKay’s work can be seen in the Tower of Babel project. Although McKay developed macular degeneration, which left him legally blind, he hand-drew these works – with a large magnifying glass – until his death in 2014. McKay described his fantastical, imaginary drawing project “Axonometropolis”: a city of the imagination; infinite in structures, roads, canals and bridges as if in a daydream.
McKay worked on the Babel Project for twenty years. Axonometropolis is a term he invented to describe a city which can only exist as an axonometric drawing, which describes mass, volume and spatial relationship without perspective. Therefore, there are no vanishing points or horizon. The buildings, pathways, lakes and gardens are visible in their actual scale, in all directions, to infinity. Because he was nearly blind, he could only create one small area at a time, using a magnifier. The drawings started in 2008 were improvised directly, in ink, freehand without a plan.
McKay’s drawings were included in a book, Visionary Architecture: Unbuilt Works of the Imagination, which featured the famous 18th Century architect, Giovanni Piranese. In 1992, he received the award of excellence in international competition from the American Society of Architectural Perspectivists. He was also a member of the Blind Artists Society. His work was exhibited at the Outsider Art Fair in NYC in 2008.
A self-taught artist, Jordan MacLachlan was born and grew up in, Toronto, Canada. From an early age she preferred staying at home where she could fashion things with clay and other materials. There would be no world in which MacLachlan did not feature animals; her kinship with them runs deep. She wove a fantasy family story for herself, choosing to believe she was an abandoned mountain lion cub whose mother had been shot, leaving her to be raised by her adoptive human family.
By the time Jordan turned sixteen, she had acquired her own kiln and became absorbed in her ever-growing collection of artwork. Jordan crafts imaginary worlds – Condo Living, Zoo Living, and Unexpected Subway Living – that explore all aspects of life, from the real to the imagined. Sculpting is an imperative for MacLachlan, who models figures every day. A single figure is born after days of labour, a group gathers several weeks later, and years pass before another world of her own making is finally realized. Unexpected Subway Living has evolved over the past few years and she intends to add figures to it ‘forever.’ Thee hundred sculptures currently populate a 25-floor surface and more figures are added with every passing month.
In Canada, Jordan has shown with public institutions, including MOCCA (Toronto), the Museum of Natural Science (Ottawa), The Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery (Waterloo), The Rooms (P.E.I), Orange (St. Hyacinthe Quebec), and the Art Gallery of Burlington. Her work was also featured in an exhibit at the Sor-Troms Museum of Outsider Art in Harstaad Norway. Jordan is represented by Marion Harris in NYC and was featured at the Outsider Art Fair in 2017 and 2018.
Not much is known about the three Lessard brothers. The elderly, single brothers live in a small town in Eastern Quebec and can only be contacted through an antique store, which keeps their carvings hidden in a back room. The carvings are exotic, erotic, and sometimes humorous.
The brothers’ sculptures are typically made from a single piece of wood and range in size from several inches to life-size.
Anick Langelier is a young, self-taught artist living in Montreal. She began painting at the age of 16 in an effort to deal with her symptoms of schizophrenia. She is a prolific artist; the apartment she shares with her father is completely filled with paintings. She lives for creating her art and stops only when she runs out of canvas and paint. Her images depict both fantasy universes and the haunting world of her childhood. She also tackles “the big questions in life”, like the existence of God and the nature of good and evil.
Langelier
has participated in solo and group exhibitions.
Karine Labrie is a young, deaf, self-taught artist living in Quebec. Labrie is fascinated with historical fashion and the monarchy; her highly-detailed ink drawings depict complex interactions between members of high society. She also creates assemblages and masks from beads and items found in thrift shops.
Over 20 years ago, when Menno Krant was in his early 40s, he was homeless, and lived in his car for a year. Time dragged and he started to doodle while he sat in the car in the dark. Later he started painting with anything on hand, and on any discarded material he could find, like cereal boxes and cigarette packages. Krant paints all day, every day. He uses whatever paint is at hand, and whatever recycled materials are around. Painting is vital to him. It’s self-nurturing. He has thousands of paintings in his home.
Krant stays away from the commerce of the art world. He doesn’t like to go to his own exhibits, he doesn’t like publicity, and he doesn’t like most art dealers. There are very few pictures of him on the Internet. His neighbours don’t know he is an artist.
