Stevo Selak, Ansambl skulptura u prirodnoj veličini / Ensemble of life-size sculptures

 

picture (around 2018) from Facebook Watch,

see link in the documentation

The ensemble of sculptures in the image above doesn't exist anymore. It was located in the backyard of a house in Banja Luka, a town of almost 200.000 inhabitants in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

Life and works

This collection, which has emerged in recent years, was a creation of Stevo Selak, who lives in the house near the site. He studied at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Banja Luka and currently has a job with an insurance company.

In his life Selak had three clinical death experiences, two times as a child. He has come out with these experiences, most recently in a video of more than an hour on YouTube (October 2020), in which  -according to the caption at the video- he saw heaven and hell and discovered amazing things.

Selak has also become known for books he wrote, such as Life of Jovanov, a book about his father's experiences in World War II and the struggles after the break-up of Yugoslavia.

this picture is a screenshot from the video
of an interview in 2016

Selak already earlier talked publicly about his experiences with recovery from clinical death, as in the summer of 2016 when he was interviewed by Mondo BiH. The picture above, a still from the video with the interview, shows how Selak while talking leans on the shoulder of a sculpture that portrays Russian president Vladimir Putin.  

This sculpture of Putin is the very first sculpture that Selak made, indeed in 2016 or slightly before. It took 200 kilos of clay to make it. At a later stage the sculpture was plasticized and painted in a chrome color.

a picture of Putin (2016), from Selak's 

account on Facebook

For several years, Vladimir Putin was flanked by Donald Trump, President of the United States (January 2017-January 2021). A sculpture of his wife Melanie was also added. 

When a violent storm raged in Banja Luka in December 2017, Trump's clay sculpture was blown over and fell apart in so many pieces that it was beyond repair. 

Melanie's sculpture was saved. A new sculpture of Trump has been made, but then with an iron infrastructure.

picture from Facebook

The sculpture collection also included a self-portrait of Selak, as can be seen in the image above, where he poses in identical clothing and in the same posture next to the (well-resembling) sculpture.

The site also had a sculpture of Selak's son Matthew and furthermore it included portrayals of Jesus Christ and Socrates (at the right in the image above), the American actor Chuck Norris (at the left in the image above), the Swedish princess Victoria (the lady in the red robe in the very first image), while also Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of North Korea since 2011, was added.

The site, which for a while was the only art environment in Bosnia and Herzegovina,  could be seen from the street, but an address is not available.

picture (2022) by Tiramisu Bootfighter

In the spring of 2022, Selak removed the sculptures because his wife was not comfortable, especially at night, with the presence of the easily accessible collection. This was reported by Tiramisu Bootfighter, who visited countries in Eastern Europe with his Galerie Ambulante in the autumn of 2022. The photo above shows Selak with the suitcase containing the ambulatory gallery

Documentation

* Article (March 2020) in newspaper Dnevni Avaz about some recent additions to the site

* Article (January 2018) in newspaper Blic about some of Selak's books

* Article (June 2017) in British newspaper the Mirror 

Video

* A video of the ensemble is available on Facebook Watch , take a look via this link  

Stevo Selak

Ensemble of life-size sculptures 

Banja Luka, suburb Paprikovac, Bosnia and Herzegovina

sculptures have been removed

Dominique Plancolaine, La belle roche / The beautiful rock

picture (2009) by lapin88
licensed under Wikimedia Commons

One of the art environments created by non-professionals in France, well known to the general public, is the complex of sculpted rocks in Rothéneuf, Brittany, created by Adolphe-Julien Fouré (1839-1910).

On the other side of France, in the Vosges, there is a small community with about 200  inhabitants, named Relanges, which like Rothéneuf is located at 48 degrees north latitude. 

Both places can boast of a collection of rock sculptures in their vicinity, and on top of that, these are -so far- the only two places in France with art environments in the quality of rock sculptures.

Compared with Fouré's art environment the one in Relanges is much smaller in size, because housed in one large piece of rock. It's also much lesser known than Abbé Fouré's creation. Both artworks were  made in earlier times, and somehow have stood the test of time. 

That is to say, the sculptures in Rothéneuf can still be visited, the creations are still present, although they have lost color and much of their shape due to coastal wind and rain. From the site in Relanges a number of sculptures has disappeared, probably stolen, but the remaining ones still look good, this also because in recent years some maintenance has been carried out, probably thanks to the municipality.

picture (January 2016) by Syrdon licensed under 
Wikimedia Commons

Relanges' large sandstone rock with small-scale sculptures is located in a forest north of the community and the sculptures were made in the 1790s by Dominique Plancolaine (1745-1804). Except that he was a local stonemason from the neighbouring village of Thuillères, there are no biographic data about this self-taught artist available. 

The site is known as la Belle Roche (the beautiful rock). but also as la Roche des 12 apôtres (the rock of the 12 apostles).

The front of the rock, parallel to the forest road, covers a plane 6.5 m long and 2.5 m high. The side of the rock, on the right-hand side as seen from the road, is 6 m long and descends from a height of 6 m to 0.5 m.

The panel at the front side has a number of niches, some of which are still filled with sculptures, some of which are empty. The side panel mainly has sculptures in high relief.

picture (October 2014) by Espirat
licensed under Wikimedia Commons

The theme of the sculptures is the life of Christ, especially the Passion.

The picture below has a number of scenes that depict moments from the Passion, such as Christ carrying the cross, the entombment and the resurrection.

On the front of the rock, parallel to the road, at the right side of the plane there is a scene in high relief with Roman soldiers nailing Christ to the cross, and more to the left there is, also in high relief, a sculpture depicting Christ on the cross with some grieving persons underneath.

In this front plane there are also a number of niches, which are partly empty because the sculptures have been stolen, and partly have scenes which probably portray some apostles, as can be seen in the image at the bottom. 

picture (October 2014) by Espirat
licensed under Wikimedia Commons

The field of art environments in Europe has only a few sites with sculpted rocks. In addition to the two sites in France, there are seven similar sites elsewhere in Europe.. That is to say, as far as is known today.

Czechia tops the list with four sites, those of Vojtech Kopic, Václav Levý, Stanislav Rolinek and Ernst Wahr. Spain has two sites, those of Mariano Ros Martinez and Longino Ayuso. And finally, there is Italy with the creation of Domenico Mengozzi.

picture (October 2014) by Espirat
licensed under Wikimedia Commons

Documentation

* A tourist website about Relanges includes a page with a number of photos of the sculptures in the rocks

* Review of the site (with pictures) on the website Lieux insolites, which also has a review and pictures of the ruins of the former Bonneval priory, located not far from the Belle Roche

* Review of the site (with pictures) on the website Lunetoile

Dominique Plancolaine

La belle roche

Relanges, dept Vosges, region Grand Est

located along the walking path GR7,  

that runs north-west of the village through 

the forest, to follow for about a kilometer.

Viktor Golovnya, Дом украшен остатками вещей / House decorated with leftover stuff

view of the front of the house

this picture and the next ones: screenprints

from the video by KerchnetTV 

Located in the extreme east of the Crimean peninsula, the city of Kerch is dominated by a 90 meter high legendary hill called Mithridates. At the foot of that hill, in Rybakova Street, was a building with remarkable decorations, the house of Viktor Fedorovych Golovnya, who was born in the mid 1940s.

It is very unfortunate that this article about the site has to be written in the past tense. This because in December 2020 the house was badly damaged by fire. This happened just two and a half years after the site in May 2018 -probably for the first time- was reviewed in the local press and featured in a video.

Luckily Golovnya survived the fire. But it is not clear where he lives, now that the house has become uninhabitable.

the side of the house, decorated with rims of car wheels

Life and works

Probably retired, Golovnya when he was interviewed in 2018 lived alone in the house. His three daughters already had left home and his wife probably had passed away, in any case she was not present at the interview.

In his working life Golovnya kept sheep, which he let roam on a part of the Mithridates hill behind his house. When he wanted to expand his sheep farm and build new stables, he did not get permission from the authorities that managed the hill. 

On the contrary, to protect the classic allure of Mithridates, by court order he had to end the sheep farming and he was only allowed to use the house and keep a small number of sheep in a stable.

composition on the roof

The now burned-down house was built by Golovnya himself.

Self-building is often a labor-intensive affair and especially now that the house was quite large and, for example, also included bedrooms for each of the three daughters, constructing he house must have taken a considerable part of Golovnya's time.

In addition, Golovnya tried as much as possible to acquire material for construction that was left unused elsewhere, which also included visiting garbage dumps.

Some neighbors have referred to Golovnya as being an eccentric because of this way of working, but probably it is rather so, that he was someone with limited financial means, who in this way could build and decorate his house with simple, cheap things, a pattern not unknown in the field of art environments.

another composition on the roof

This way of obtaining and using scraps of building material led to the appearance of the house being somewhat untidy, as depicted in the very first photo. 

At the same time, this form of collecting material gave Golovnya the opportunity to find things to use for making exterior an interior decorations. 

Exterior decorations 

So the second photo from above shows the side of the house with a structure that is unclear in terms of function, situated behind grilles, with decorations such as car wheel rims, bells and other things.

The third photo from above was a composition that probably also was added to the roof, although pictures do not confirm this. It's a colorful fantasy character, possibly part of a children's bicycle, with a base of three metal hemispheres.

Another composition on the roof is depicted above. It's a weather vane composed of metal basins, flanked by a number of spiral items.

decorations on an interior wall

Interior decorations

As far as the interior is concerned, the photos above and below only to a limited extent give an impression of the lavishness of the decorations. In this respect the video referred to in the documentation, is more informative.

A wall with many photos and portraits documented Golovnya's family history. There were pictures of his daughters and there was a painting that portrays his grandfather, Mikhail Ivanovich Bondarenko, and another one of his father who, as told by Golovnya, was in the Russian army, fighting against the Germans in 1942 near Kerch.

However, the family photos were just a small part of the many, many items that decorate the floor, the ceiling, the tables and cabinets, but especially the interior walls.

There were carpets on the floor, canvases on the ceiling and walls filled with a multitude of paintings and photos, cabinets covered with teapots, a variety of pendant lamps, thermos jugs ..... an extensive and at first sight disordered combination of all kinds of items. together however making an overwhelming visual impression.

Not all items displayed in the interior were collected by Golovnya himself. Neighbors and friends also came along with remnants. 

Some of those donors assumed aloud that the decorated interior for Golovnya was kind of a paradise, but he himself said that his house was more of a barn. This may indicate that he was not so much characterized by an inner urge to transform the living room of his house into a kind of an artistic collection, but rather that he was not able to stop collecting things.

A good look at the types of items that made up the collection (as shown in the images in this post) reveals that these are items that are typically found in living rooms in European countries, such as paintings, photos, clocks, lamps, bottles, curtains. Other items from the dump, such as old clothing, parts of old bicycles, garden equipment and the like, are missing in the items exposed in the interior.

So the peculiarity of the interior was not primarily in the type of decorations. The impressive, even alienating effect of the collection had mainly to do with it's large size, which in turn is related to the fact that Golovnya could hardly stop collecting and displaying leftover stuff, a characteristic that is encountered in many people who create an art environment.

The size of the collection, in conjunction with Golovnya's passion for collecting, contributes to the conclusion that the now-burnt items on the roof and the interior collection of leftover stuff could be viewed as a modest art environment in the capacity of a decorated interior and exterior.

Documentation

* Article (May 2018) on the website of local newspaper Kerch.com

* Article (December 2020) on the same website with a report about the fire

Video

* Video (May 2018) by KerchNET TV  (4'25", YouTube)

thanks to Alexander Emelyanov, who not only drew my attention to this art environment, but also helped to make accessible the Russian spoken in the videos 

Viktor Golovnya

House decorated with leftover stuff

Rybakova Street

Kerch, Crimea, Russia

site destroyed by fire

Kahl, Chalet Enchantée / Enchanted Chalet

all pictures, except the one of the summer-market,

from Facebook

The small town of Valence d'Agen, a community with about 5,000 inhabitants in the south of France, can feel happy that an exceptionally colorful art environment was begun the past year (2020) , a year that was also characterized by a pandemic which brought a lot of grief and limitations. It is a site created with the aim to propagate Bonheur (Happiness) ...

Life and work

The site is being developed by a female artist in the field of what in France is referred to as art singulier.  She calls herself Kahl, which is a pseudonym formed by a number of letters of her real name.

two videos showing mobile creations

Born in 1965 in Troyes, in the north east of France, it was not obvious that she would work in a creative setting, and initially, because of her studies, she had very different work, such as activities in the fields of communication and the education of children.

However, she began to feel more and more that there was another direction ahead for her, more artistic, and especially in the direction of art singulier.

As she said: Mon parcours de vie m'a guidé sur ce chemin que je n'envisageais pas et voilà ... C'était écrit quelque part ....(My life journey has guided me on this path that I did not envision and here it is ... It was written somewhere ....)

She overcame a disease and after great efforts and thanks to a strong character she felt reborn, able to take a New Beautiful Color Path.

In the late 1990s she moved from Troyes to La Rochelle, on the French west coast. There she opened a small art gallery, where she sold works of art singular artists. 

She started painting herself and signed her paintings with the pseudonym KAHL. And then, it turned out that many people, not knowing that Kahl was the owner of the gallery, were interested in her paintings which they valued as attractive work full of color, made by an artist with a distinctly feminine palette.

Stimulated by the apparent appreciation of her work by visitors to the gallery, Kahl began to give painting an important place in her life. She participated in exhibitions and the appreciation of her work continued unabated. It was also a nice experience that the characterization feminine palette  turned out to be correct when, for example, at awards ceremonies after participating exhibitions, she publicly announced that she was the artist named Kahl.

In 2008 she was awarded the first prize in La Rochelle's Festival d'Art.

Move to the area of Tarn et Garonne

In 2010, Kahl moved from La Rochelle to the Tarn et Garonne region, an area in the south of France she had met many years earlier while on holiday. She went to live in Bardigues, a community about 10 kilometers south of Valence d'Agen, where she later would establish the art environment that ultimately gave rise to her presence in this weblog.

She became a well-known artist in the area, which she crossed with a van full of paintings, her own work and that of others, to sell at markets in various villages and towns around.

 

photo of a summer market in 2013 on the Place Nationale 

in Valence with paintings by Kahl on sale

(photo from weblog marchesete2013.blogspot.com)

In 2017, she had to temporarily interrupt her busy work to undergo surgery because of a cardio problem and a back ailment, but after that rest she was able to quickly return to her places in markets and in the art trade.

In many places in the region she also was active in giving painting lessons, especially to children, in participating in exhibitions and with the sale of paintings in art galleries, the latter for example from May 2019 in the Galerie d Art Singulier on the Rue Notre Dame nr 1 in Valence d'Agen.

Then, in early 2020, she took a new step in her development as an artist. She left the gallery and moved into new accommodation.

This new accommodation was a free-standing building in the style of a chalet, situated on a generously sized lawn in the vicinity of a McDonald's in Valence d'Agen.

The walls in the interior of the chalet are fully occupied by Kahl's paintings, and maybe also those of other artists, just as was the case in the galleries she managed. 

It is the outdoor space where the difference with the past manifests itself.

The images in this post show that now also large-scale creations, often more than man-sized, have become part of Kahl's creative activities.

Some of these rising creations represent more or less human characters, others consist of colorful poles with a wheel placed horizontally at the top, and they all have a cheerful appearance, full of bright colors, smiling faces, whatever,  and in any case they are composed of recycled material (Récup, in French). 

In addition, many of the creations have a lively character, with elements that move up and down in the wind, rotate or they move as its suits.

The outside space, where Kahl's green-decorated van has a place too, now also includes items such as flower boxes, a decorated chair, panels with texts ...

It is almost unbelievable to see how, in about a year's time, an ordinary piece of grassland has turned into an attractive, cheerful and happiness-radiating art environment where visitors are welcome.

Documentation

* Kahl's website (with pictures of her paintings and the creations in the garden)

* Kahl's page on Facebook

Kahl 

Enchanted Chalet

rue du Cluzel

82400 Valence d'Agen, dept Tarn et Garonne, region Occitanie

can be seen from the street and can be visited 

visiting hours 10-12.30 and 15.30-17.30

streetview (2016)