Sylvain Corentin, Extérieur décoré / Decorated exterior

images are screenprints from the video in the documentation

The image above shows part of a decorated exterior wall of a house in Prades-le-Lez, a commune of about 6,200 inhabitants located north of Montpellier, in the south of France.

These decorations were made by Sylvain Corentin, who was born in Montpellier on November 23, 1962, to a family with a somewhat controlling mother and a father who was a police officer.

As a child, Sylvain had a somewhat difficult time at school, which led him to withdraw into a fantasy world he depicted in drawings.

After his years at school, he went on to higher education, which was a liberating experience for him. 

He enjoyed musical groups and nevertheless managed to earn an art diploma.

After graduating, he worked in education and got married. The couple settled in Prades-le-Lez and had three children.

Corentin left teaching and, following his heart, became an artist.

In that capacity he initially made sketches on paper, but after some time he went in a completely different direction by beginning to investigate what it was like to make three-dimensional creations;

At some point he started focusing on creating all kinds of white tower-like structures, as depicted in the image below.

\Sylvain Corentin explained his motivation for this: "I really want these towers to look like ephemeral dwellings. Ultimately, I don't like things that are too rigid. I love this hut-like look. Initially, humans integrated with nature by building ephemeral things, using what nature offered them".

Sylvain Corentin worked for several months at the International Museum of Modest Arts (MIAM) in Sète, which brought him into close contact with outsider art. He also met prominent artists in this field, such as Danielle Jacqui.

From that moment on, his work truly took off. 

He traveled to the United States, where he met a gallery owner in New York who specialized in American artists working in the field of outsider art. 

Since then, his work has been acquired by numerous American collections, and he has participated in exhibitions and art fairs throughout the United States.

His contacts with the world of outsider art most likely also led him to start decorating the outside walls of his house.

In any case, the style in which the decorations are applied to the outside wall of his house is such that a presentation of the decorated exterior in this weblog about outsider art environments seems appropriate,

Documentations

* Website of Sylvain Corentin

* Article (2025) on the weblog Tipeek

* Article  (2020) on the website Artistes de France, Occitanie

* Article (2019) on the website Hérault Tribune

Video

* Video (9'58", 2023) on Facebook

Sylvain Corentin

Decorated exterior

76 rue du Puech-Marty, 

Prades-le-Lez, north of Montpellier, dept Herault, region Occitanie, France

decorations can be seen from the street

Fittie Quarter in Aberdeen, Art environments

all pictures courtesy of Sophie Lepetit
see Documentation

The cottage pictured above is located in a district officialy named Footdee district, but locally known as Fittie Quarter. in the city of Aberdeen, located along the North Sea in Scotland.

It is a district close to the coast, near the entrance to Aberdeen's harbor and it was once known as a place with houses occupied by fishermen, harbour personnel and pilots who guide ships.   

The district was built in the 19th century by the municipality of Aberdeen, which sold the houses around 1870, giving residents more opportunity to customize their homes. 

This happened indeed, many houses were extende upwards, but the character of the district, which only has a few streets, has been preserved and has even developed in a distinctive way, particularly in terms of the houses' decoration.

another decorated house

Today, the relatively small Fittie neighborhood has a unique atmosphere, with its many colorful small houses, some of which are made of wood.

The most striking feature of the neighborhood is that many houses have decorated front gardens or facades, some simply, but in some cases so elaborate that they could be classified as art environments.

Two of these art environments are presented below.

The Blue House

First, the blue house.

On the roof ridge stands a weather vane, and on the right side a large owl. The facade is decorated with various maritime objects, such as a lifebuoy and an anchor, while the two large rectangular images depict ships.

The low wall separating the front garden from the street, is filled with a series of small sculptures depicting various people and birds

And then, both the man in the green sweater and red trousers, situated at the right, and the large seagull in the center foreground are eye-catching creations.

The name of the one who created this art environment, is unknown.

The white house

This last point also applies to the second series of creations. 

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They show a small house with a white facade and a tiled floor between house and street. The design of this white site is somewhat more modest than the blue one.

The front wall of the house is decorated with all sorts of birds, and on the steps leading to the front door a man and a woman are seated, he dressed in green and she in red.

On the threshold of the front door stands a pot of flowers between two small sculptures.

The space between the front door and the street is completely filled with flower pots and on the right side -as seen from the street- it is sheltered by a high wall with all sorts of decorations.   

The low wall between the outdoor area and the street is filled with potted flowers, between which all sorts of small sculptures are on display, that wave to passersby.

The image below gives a good impression of the street where the house is located. 

This same atmosphere is also present in the few other streets in the Fittie neighborhood, which is now classified as a protected cityscape.

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Documentation

* Article  (October 2018) on Scotland Travel Blog by Susanne Arbucle

* Article  (Augusr 2020) on the website Globe-Trottine

* Article  (November 2025) on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit

Video

* Video (13'33", YouTube,  August 2023) by Brummie in the Highlands.The two art environments in this post are close to each other and appear in the video at 4'50" .

Art environments

Fittie Quarter

Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom

can be seen from the street

Bert van Houten, Kermis attracties in miniatuur / Fairground attractions in miniature

images are screenprints from the video in the docmentation

A collection of miniature creations can be seen as an art environment on a smaller scale, as is the case, for example, with the collection of miniature vehicles that Willem van Genk -from the Netherlands-  had brought together in his home.

The following post addresses a similar situation, albeit one involving a collection of fairground attractions in miniature, handcrafted and assembled by Bert van Houten, also from the Netherlands.

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Life and works

Born in the early 1940s, Bert van Houten currently lives in Liempde, a village part of the municipality of Boxtel in the Dutch province of North Brabant. 

At the age of seven he crafted a merry-go-round from a cardboard box and he would carry this interest with him throughout all of his his life.

Currently in his early 80s, he owns a collection of five miniature fairground attractions. 

As the images in this post show, his creations are incredibly realistic and accurate down to the smallest details.

Each of the structures he created required thousands of hours of work, often taking five years to complete. He made every part himself and did everything from memory, working without drawings.

And if something went wrong, he would start again.

Bert van Houten wasn't just fascinated by creating miniature amusement rides, he was also interested in the fair itself.

So for many years he was vice-chairman of the fondation for Kermis Cultuur in Nederland.(Fair Culture in the Netherlands).

With his miniature attractions he was a regular guest at the renowned Dutch fair in Tilnurg, a town in the south of the Netherlands. The fair was the largest in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg (Benelux). 

When Bert van Houten in 2016 approached the age of 75, he announced his intention to retire from the fairground industry.

Van Houten's creations were not only on display at the Tilburg fair, but were also regularly exhibited in nursing homes, often accompanied by gatherings for residents featuring singing and music. 

The residents of these homes found these gatherings a fond memory of times gone by and the appreciation Bert van Houren received was the crowning glory of his work.

Documentation

* Article (October 2022) in newspaper DTV nieuws

* Article ((October 2022) by Omroep Brabant

Video

* Video (YouTube, August 2025,  4'58") by Mediamannen

Bert van Houten

Fairground attractions in miniature

Liempde, Noord-Brabant province, Netherlands

Zbigniew Redyk, Ogród rzeźb / Sculpture garden

images by Jedrzej Labarzewski and Eliza Labarzewska

As can be seen in the image above, a house in Kierwik, Poland, features a number of sculptures, two of which are so large that they tower over the side wall of the house.

Life and works

These sculptures were created by Zbigniew Redyk, who worked his entire life in construction, primarily in the Polish capital. He is now retired and will be be around seventy at the time this article is published.

Once retired he settled in Kierwik. a village in northeastern Poland known for its picturesque landscapes and proximity to natural attractions.

There he began creating sculptures from concrete.

one of the other sculptures

The image at the top of this article, made in 2022, shows an arrangement of some of these creations.

The red-hued sculpture on the right side of the house, over 3 meters tall and weighing approximately 300 kilos, is referred to as the the Sun Follower. Next to him stands a smaller, black sculpture depicting Anubis, a god in Egyptian mythology who was depicted as a jackal

Then there is a small white structure with two flags with the colours of Poland and the scene ends with a sculpturen of a warrior. At the entrance to the garden stand two large wolves.

The images in this post were made in early 2022 and by now Zbigniew Redyk may have made more creations.

Documentation

* Article on the website Znalezienie, edited by Radek Labarzewski

Video

* Video (made around 2021) by TVP3 Olsztyn on Facebook, with scenes of the decorations in the interior of the house

Zbigniew Redyk

Sculpture garden

Kierwik, municipality of Świętajno, region Ermland-Mazurië, Poland

Marc Nucera, Jardin de sculptures / Sculpture garden

all pictures courtesy of Sophie Lepetit,
see documentation

In Noves, a commune with around 6,000 inhabitants (2022) in the southern French department of Bouches-du-Rhône, there is a garden with a collection of wooden sculptures, as shown in the images in this post.

Life and works

This art environment has been created by Marc Nucera, who was born in 1966 in Châteaurenard, some 5 km west of Noves. 

His father was a furniture maker. and so young Marc got to know different types of wood at an early age.

When he started working as a farm laborer after school, he collected large round disks of wood from tree trunks, which he managed to saw out himself and kept at home, without really knowing why.

Trees continued to fascinate him, and in 1990, at age 24, he began a project in which he manipulated trees, specifically the height of their branches, to ensure that their further growth would be as harmonious as possible. 

Marc Nucera did this with due consideration for the surroundings of the trees and their continued natural development.

This was an approach that particularly appealed to owners of large gardens, and after an initial assignment his way of working spread. 

He became kind of a landscape architect.and got more assignments for this type of maintenance work, which was probably also a pleasant source of income for him.

A next step in his approach to trees occurred when he began to focus on what could be done in terms of working with tree trunks.

Initially, Nucera used the wood from these trunks to make wooden chairs and tables, an activity he was able to pursue because he had moved into a house in Noves, where he could easily set up a studio.

From this rather simple woodworking method, he soon moved on to creating wooden sculptures, primarily of human figures, as the surrounding images show.

By then, he had gained so much experience in working with the chainsaw that he could undertake this more complex approach with a high degree of artistry.

Marc Nucera used trunks of different types of trees, such as olive, oak, almond, lime, cypress, but also cedar, which can have a surprising scent.

Working with chainsaws in the manner Mark Nucera did, takes strength and perseverance, and he displayed this, coupled with a loving approach to who or what he was portraying.

Working with tree fragments in his studio or in the garden near his home was also of great significance to Nucera. 

As he explains on his website, this allowed him to free himself from the forces inherent in the trees' locations. Working in or near his studio, he experienced the freedom to choose a design that wasn't tied to a specific location.

What you can do with a chainsaw turned out to be a large range of possibilities.

As the images in this post show, the variety of characters that Marc Nucera manages to extract from the cylindrical trunk of a tree is great.

Doucmentation

*  Website of Marc Nucera

*  Article (Septemberv 2016) on the website of Sophie Lepetit, with a serie op photos and a biography

*  Article (October 2016) on Facebook with a series of mages by Sophie Lepetit

*  Article on the website Retour de Voyage

*  Article (2020) on the weblog of Fabien Ribéry

A French book about Marc Nucera

"Les sculptures de Marc Nucera", text by Elisabeth Couturier and Françoise Bertaux, foreword by Chantal Colleu-Dumond, published by Actes Sud, 2020, 160 pages

Video

* Video (Vimeo, 26"08') by Emmanuelle Satti

* Another video (2024) by Villa Datris, publshed on Facebook, with comments by Marc Nucera, subtitled in Enlish, 

Marc Nucera

Garden with sculptures

Noves, dept Bouches-du-Rhône, region Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. France

can be visited on appointmen

Władysław Szymczyk, Wnętrze ozdobione drewnianymi kreacjami / Interior decorated with wooden creations

this image and the next three are screenshots
from the movie in the documentation

The image above shows the front of a nursing home in Miszewo Murowany, a community in Poland, not far from the city of Plock. It also shows a person approaching the building with some kind of cargo.

The cargo in the cart includes several pieces of wood and the person pulling the cart is Władysław Szymczyk.

Life and works

Szymczyk was born in 1943 to a farming family in Tasto, Poland.

From a young age, he had to live with the disability of being deaf, which also meant that he didn't learn to read or write and that he couldn't express himself properly. 

This led to his admission in 1964 to a nursing home in Miszewo Murowany, near Płock, when he was in his early twenties.

 

For many years Władysław Szymczyk worked on a farm managed by the nursing home.  

However, in 1996, in his early fifties, he began working with wood, an activity he was likely able to undertake when the nursing home for the benefit of the residents had set up a working space with the necessary equipment.

The surrounding images give an impression of how Szymczyk worked with wood.

Before he starts working on a piece of wood, he makes a drawing, as shown in the image above, which gives a general idea of ​​what the creation should look like.

His wooden creations are usually left unpainted and they are lightly sanded to give the wood even more expressiveness. 

The the constituent parts of the creations are very realistic. 

For example, when Szymczyk makes a vehicle, its wheels can always turn; and if he makes a bus, the wooden equivalent will be equipped with doors that can open and close, and also with a double row of seats, visible by lifting the roof.

this image and the next three from the website Znalezienie

Active as a woodworker since the 1990s, Władysław Szymczyk must have amassed a substantial collection of small-scale wooden creations.

If this collection has a place in the nursing home, it can be considered as an art environment in the category of interior decorated with woodcarvings.

And if that's not the case, then Władysław Szymczyk still deserves an article in this blog, because he is one of the three main characters in the film series The Others. Art Is Where No One Looks

The films were shot in the summer of 2021 and their presentation took place on December 10, 2021 in a cinema in Płock. 

In addition to Wladuslaw Szymczyk, the triumvirate includes Wlodzimierz Roston and Wacław Rędziński, who have already been described in previous posts.

Documentation

* Article  by Radek Labarzewski on his website Znalezienie

Video

* Video (realized in 2021, YouTube, 6'57") on the channel of Znalezienie (subtitled in French) 

Władysław Szymczyk
Interior decorated with wooden creations 

Nursing home in Miszewo Murowany, near Plock,  dept Mazowieckie,  Poland 

José María Pérez Ruiz, La Casa Barco España / The house "Barco España"

this image and the next six courtesy of Jo Farb Hernandez
see Docementation 

Almuñécar is a Spanish city with some 27.000 inhabitants (2024), located along the Mediterranean sea, in the southwestern part of the coast of Granadina in the province of Granada.

This city was the hometown of José María Pérez Ruiz (1937-2025), also affectionately known as Pepe Pérez.

If you're wondering what the image of a ship has to do with where he lived.. .that ship was his home !

Life and works

Pepe Pérez' was conceived in 1937 when his father, who had a job as a barber, was on a short leave from military service during the Spanish Civil War.

At age twenty-two he joined the Merchant Marines, a choice that would have a major influence on the rest of his life.

In 1967, thirty years old, he married María del Carmen, who worked as a teacher, The couple would have two daughters and a son.

From his early years, Pérez was professionally connected with the shipping industry, a connection so strong indeed that it could be said that his heart lay in life at sea. 

His favorite saying was, “My ship is my treasure, my god is freedom, my law is strength and the wind, my only homeland is the sea.”

Pérez's dream was to build a house in Almuñécar that would always remind him of his connection to the sea..

He succeeded in realizing that dream, because in early 1970, with the help of a cousin, he began building a house. It was a unique construction in the shape of a 75-meter-long ship, full of nautical details, located along a road to the nearby popular beach of San Cristóbal.

The building is filled with maritime items, which Pérez bought here and there in ports, for example, when he heard that a ship was being scrapped. He acquired portholes, masts, ropes...... in short, all sorts of ship parts and instruments.

The interior of the ship that Pérez Ruiz constructed includes what you'd expect in a typical house: rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and so on.

It's not visible from the street, but behind the building there is a terrace with a swimming pool and a vegetable garden.

José Maria Pérez Ruiz passed away on January 9, 2025.

Documentation

* This art enviroment is introduced and analyzed in the book: Jo Farb Hernandez, Singular Spaces II: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments. Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2023 

* Article (January 2025) in Spanish newspaper Ideal

* Article (January 2025) in Spanish newspaper ABC de Granada

Video

* Video (2009, YouTube, 4'10#') by Canalsur, an interview with Pérez Ruiz

 

José María Pérez Ruiz

La Casa-Barco España 

Avenida del Mediterrano  34 

Almuñécar,  province of Granada, Spain

can be seen from the street

Google Streetview