this picture (September 2021) and the next three screenprints from Google Maps
The Scottish art environments reviewed so far in this blog, such as those created by Alex Batchelor, Frank Bruce, William R. Bisset and the anonymous maker of the shell decorated property Shelleen, are all situated in small towns or rural areas.
However, the Scottish art environment discussed in this article, is located in the large city of Glasgow, and not in a back street, but along the London Road, one of the major thoroughfares in the city.
August 2008
Life and works
The creator of this art environment, Jim Donnelly (also James Donnelly or JD), was born in 1941. He became a trader at a market in Glasgow called Barras, a special market focused on the sale of handmade products. He also developed as an outsider artist, mainly working on a variety of paintings in a personal style.
Donnelly was probably married, because available documentation states that a daughter died when she was 26 years old. However, in the following story about the part of his life that began in his early sixties, no wife appears.
On November 8, 2002, a large group of police officers searched Donnelly's house in connection with stolen jewelry belonging to the mother of Princess Diana, who lived in a house on the island of Seil, 185 kilometers north-west of Glasgow.
The search of the house was probably correct in a formal sense, but it was based on a rather vague description of the perpetrator, in which the Glasgow police believed they recognized Donelly, who as a market trader was more or less a public figure in Glasgow.
The raid by the police deeply affected Donnelly. As a suspected thief, he felt he was being treated very unfairly and moreover, the search of the house had caused all kinds of irreparable damage to the house.
September 2012
The police saw no reason to improve the situation with some form of compensation and continued to adopt a formalistic approach.
Donnelly, for his part and given his artistic background, saw no other way to express his disappointment and find compensation for his sadness, than by transforming the space in front of his house into an area of protest expressions.
It became a project that continues to this day and the site is regularly provided with new expressions. The first manifestation was relatively modest in size, but gradually an extensive and colorful set of signs emerged that filled the entire strip along the street in front of the house.
The protest signs include various texts that refer to the theft of the jewelry or speak of illegal activities by the police, but there are also images that express how Donelly experienced the event, for example an image of the face of a man with the word gagged between his lips, snakes wriggling on the sign, heads of men with their finger in front of their mouth to indicate that there is silence .....
July 2019
In December 2015, a petition was sent to Nicola Sturgeon, at that time political leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland, asking her to pay attention to the conflict and to do justice to Jim Donnelly, but this did not lead to action.
Documentation
* Article by Katherine Sutherland in Raw Vision #116 (December 2023)
The photo above shows a nameplate attached to the left of the entrance door of a house in Saint-Jean-d'Assé, a French municipality with about 1000 inhabitants, located 20 km north of the city of Le Mans.
The other parts of the house and the associated buildings are just as lavishly decorated.
Let's go take a look
the house as seen when approaching it from the D338
The house is located on the left side of the D338, a few kilometers north of the center of Saint-Jean-d'Assé.
When Laurent Delion, a former painter in construction, and his partner Jeannine in 1997 moved into the property, both the living house and the accompanying barns had been plastered almost entirely white.
Once settled, Delion soon started decorating the walls of his new home and when he was interviewed by Radio France in October 2016, the exterior walls were already heavily decorated with all kinds of items, but no mosaic had yet been applied.
These mosaic applications were added in the period after 2016 and are present in later photos, such as the ones in this post.
Viewed from the road, the site now comprises a first section with a decorated barn and a fence, this section merging into the main house with decorated front and side facades. Then the main house has a decorated extension again.
The decorations are of three kinds: numerous colorful items, mosaic decorations and textual elements.
A large variety of decorative items
As for the various items that act as decorative elements, Delion has said it all started with a scooter, a simple wooden object, placed on the edge of the roof.
To obtain more objects, Delion visited garage sales, thrift shops and similar places where old things can be obtained for little money. Over the years, his passion for collecting these items has resulted in an extensive collection of all kinds of objects, such as dolls, buddhas, columns, statues of saints, milk cans, toys, just to name a few.
In addition, Delion also manufactured certain items himself. Everything that has been made of iron or concrete, such as structures of chains, iron uprights, tubular pillars or concrete pedestals with birds, comes from his hand.
Placed on the roofs, hung on the outside walls and gathered on the tiled strip at the front of the barn and the house, the items lose their functional meaning and merge into the whole that as such acquires its own identity and appearance.
The mosaic decorations have been applied in recent years, especially on the left side and the front of the house.
In part, these mosaics fill the white space between items previously mounted on the wall, but to a greater extent they have an autonomous decorative function, for example when arranged around a newly applied image of a person's face, a piece of heraldry or a Madonna.
The items and images around which the mosaic decorations have been grouped are so numerous that almost every piece of wall displays its own theme, such as in the image below, for example, both a milkmaid and a crocodile decorate the wall (the other animals are in front of the wall).
This way of arranging implies that these themes can only be observed up close, and that their specific meaning disappears and merges into a broader view if the decorations are looked at from some distance,
Most of the images in this post present the decorations from that broader view, which is a conscious choice, because this is the best way to give an impression of the design of this art environment as such.
some textual elements in the front part of the site
In Delion's art environment the textual elements are rather common, so they deserve separate mention as an image-determining element.
There are posters with practical notices, saying, for example, that visitors are welcome, are allowed to take pictures, are asked to respect the times when the meal is consumed and not to turn their car in view of the neighbours.
But there are also textual expressions with a more aphoristic meaning, such as this one:
Avoir une pair de mains, c'est bien. Mais savoir s'en servir, c'est mieux, n'est ce pas ? (Having a
pair of hands is good. But knowing how to use it is better, isn't it?)
Or this one:
Je suis comme le bon vin, je vieilli bien (I'm like good wine, I age well)
Some decorative items have been provided with an explanatory text, such as an image of a rooster, which states Je suis le coq du village (I am the rooster of the village) or the explanation on a sign with a key, saying La clé du paradis (The key to paradise).
And, characteristic of the years 2020 and 2021, there is an inscription in which the healthcare staff of hospitals is thanked.
Champigny-sur-Marne, a municipality with around 78.000 inhabitants, is a suburb of Paris located south-east of the capital. In the 1970s/80s this community was home to an art environment, that now (2020) is in disrepair, with probably only a few remnants remaining.
The site was located at the Rue Diderot and its creator Marcel Lellouche (born in 1908), had designated it as Le Petit Musée (the small museum).
When in May 2018 Google Streetview drove past the Rue Diderot, this yielded below image of the entrance of the Petit Musée: a concrete wall with closed corrugated iron doors, located in the middle of urban high-rise buildings.
The concrete wall appears to be provided with a (difficult to recognize) decoration and with some effort the text Le petit musée can be distinguished
Behind the corrugated iron doors there is an elongated plot of land, divided into a courtyard at the front where meanwhile a large tree has sprouted and a rear part with a house where Lellouche lived.
Life and works
Lellouche in his working life was a retailer in fruit and vegetables.
He probably used the elongated plot of land as a space for the storage of his merchandise and as a place to park his van and other utensils that he needed to carry out his trade as a retailer and market merchant.
from the website Habitants Paysagistes (Lille Art Museum)
Retired in 1970, when he was in his early sixties, Lellouche began transforming the site into an art environment.
This art environment can broadly be characterized by three elements:
- a variety of mosaics from small stones attached to the walls,
- freestanding, mostly mosaic structures and
- a number of texts added to the walls.
The picture above shows Lellouche in front of some of his wall decorations, such as flowers in vases and a sailing ship, these combined with some fragments of texts.
The site included a number of comparable wall decorations, such as depictions of a soldier and various African characters.
Another wall decoration can be seen on the right of above picture, where the blue, white and red of the French flag is depicted in combination with an inscription reading Dieu protège la France (God protects France).
The left part of the image shows an arch of honor constructed by Lellouche, presumably in honor of the lady whose name, Marie-Genevieve, is on the arch but about whom no further information is available.
On top of the arch there are four letters that together form the sign მ I მ I . It's not clear what this means. One could interpret this as DIDI, but then again it is not clear to whom this refers
It is also tempting to interpret the combination of letters as GIGI, since elsewhere in this art environment an inscription to a a circular wall has this word. As shown in the picture above, the inscription says Heureux anniversaire à notre chére roman Gigi Les Bêtes (Happy birthday to our dear novel Gigi Les Bêtes).
Gigi is a famous book (1944) by French author Colette (1873-1954), a book that was not only adapted into a play, but also into two films and a musical. She also wrote two books with Bêtes in the title.
On the wall depicted in above picture, the name Claudie has been added. It's unclear to whom this refers.
However, there is more clarity about the ship that is also depicted. This must be a replica of the SS France, with its 316 meter the longest ship in the world at its time, built on a yard in Saint-Nazaire and put into service in February 1962.
This replica is one of the freestanding creations of this art environment.
Another freestanding mosaic creation is the large owl, as in above picture.
Other freestanding items that decorated the site included a some three meter high replica of a windmill and a horse pulling a hearse.
To conclude this overview of the creations in Lellouche's art environment, let's quote some of the texts he added to the walls.
There is a text that reads On est pas des pneus, mais il faut que l'on crève quand même (We are not tires, but we have to die anyway).
Another one, partially visible in the picture with Lellouche standing in front of a sailing ship, says "Quinou" Je les offre á Maman et a ma chère mémé ("Quinou" I offer these to Mom and to my dear Grandma)
And finally, depicted in the picture above, there is a quote at the top of an otherwise empty piece of wall rising above a planter with green plants, which says: Ici le decor est beau, mais l'ennui est grand (The decor here is beautiful, but the boredom is great).
It's a sigh that may say something about Lellouche's state of mind. He was a tormented person indeed, and when receiving visitors he could sometimes confuse them.
Lellouche continued to work on the decorations until around 1989, when he was in his early 80s.
It is not known when he died.
The site has been almost completely lost
Nowadays hardly anything has remained of this art environment. The free-standing structures have disappeared, just as the arch with the inscription Marie-Genevieve. There are just some remnants of the bas-reliefs and the inscriptions on the wall, although very damaged,
Documentation
* The site has a review in Bruno Montpied's extensive inventory of French art environments Le gazouillis des éléphants, Paris (Ed. du Sandre), 2017. -926 p
* Short review and a series of photos by Francis David on the website Habitants-Paysagistes (Lille Art Museum)
* Article by Sonia Terhzaz, reporting the visits she paid to the site in 2014 and 2022, on her website Cartographie des Rocamberlus (2023), with photos of remaining creations
first published November 2020, last revised April 2023
Maurice Lellouche
Le petit musée
63 rue Diderot
Champigny-sur-Marne, dept Val-de-Marne, region Île-de-France, France
this picture and the next one (probably around 2010) by Jean-Pierre Faurie as on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit
Regional newspaper Ouest-France has reported that Marcel Marionneau from the community of Le Bourg-sous-la-Roche in the Vendée department, died early November 2019. He was known locally as the author of the texts and decorations on the facade of his house, .
Life and works.
Marionneau, who was born in 1943, in his youth was attracted to making art, in particular sculptures, and when he was in his mid-twenties he took lessons with artists in Paris and Angers .
In May 1968 he returned to his native region and settled in Le Bourg-sous-la-Roche, part of the municipality of La Roche-sur-Yon in the French department Vendée, a place where he would spend his entire life.
His house on the rue Emile Bauman had various changes during the fifty years that Marionneau has lived there, both on the inside, where Marionneau installed his workshop and situated his sculptures, paintings and books, and on the outside, where he added decorations and texts to the exterior walls, which changed over time and eventually almost disappeared.
An article in the regional journal Ouest France of May 2019, written by Patrick Guyomard, who met Marionneau at home, tells that at that time the interior wasn't only filled with sculptures and canvasses with paintings, but also with books, documents and archives. which testified to the search that the artist undertook for what he referred to as "the intellectual synthesis of human knowledge".
One of the themes Marionneau reflected on was the volume courbe (curved volume) ¹, which has to do with the perfect beauty. Just as the circle and the square and their spatial equivalents the sphere and the cube can be seen as ideal shapes, one can reflect on and theorize about the shape of the ideal curve and in particular how this would manifest itself spatially as a volume.
Marionneau has devoted himself a lot to this theme in theory, but also in his practice as a sculptor.
The wall decorations
Regarding the decorations on the facade, it is not known in which year Marionneau started this project, but its quite possible that he already began in the 1970s.
The artist did, however, indicate something about his initial intentions. They had to do with a card game known in the Vendée called Le jeu de l’Aluette. It has been played for centuries in groups of four people, two against two, with a set of cards that includes all kinds of images and symbols.
By making frescoes on the outside wall in such a familiar pattern, Marionneau wanted to communicate with the other residents.
Around 1990 the entire facade was decorated with a beautiful set of frescoes.
However, when a television crew would visit the site to make recordings for a broadcast about the now well-known art environment, Marionneau panicked and replaced part of the frescoes with texts.
The two pictures above show both the part with the frescoes and the part with the texts.
Around 2005 a new moment came in the development of the art environment.
Marionneau then decided to focus his attention on painting and sculpting. This also included that he abstained from further development or maintenance of the decorations on the facade and the side walls. In the course of the following years this would lead to their gradual decay.
streetview June 2018
The pictures above show that in June 2018 the left side wall still included the (meanwhile affected) texts.
The left part of the facade still had a number of (faded) frescoes, but the right part of the facade and the side wall at the right had been washed with a gray paint.
Marionneau in the artworld
On the internet virtually no information is available about Marionneau's position in the art world. An entry on the Art Insolitewebsite suggests that his artistic work isn't part of French mainstream art, but belongs to what is referred to in France as art singulier (singular art),
This indication is also used in an announcement of an exhibition of his drawings and sculptures in June 2018 in Galerie Monier in La Roche-sur-Yonne.
Documentation * Article (November 2019) in regional journal Ouest-France announcing Marionneau's death
* An earlier article (May 2019) by Patrick Guyomard, also in Ouest-France with a report about a visit to Marionneau's house and workshop
*Some pictures on websiteArt Insolite, with a text by Jean-Pierre Faurie, republished on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit (October 2010 and September 2017)
note ¹ Volume Courbe is also the name of a London-based band around singer/songwriter Charlotte Marionneau, who comes from France and is referred to as a friend of Charles Marionneau Marcel Marionneau 36 rue Emile Baumann 85000 La Roche-sur-Yon, dept Vendée, region Pays-de-la-Loire
what currently (2019) remains of the wall decorations can be seen from the street streetview
The small community of Corralejo in the far north of the Spanish island of Fuerteventura is home to a house that is exuberantly provided with all kinds of creations. It's the Villa Tabaiba, home of Carlo Calderón Yruegas and his wife.
Life and works
Born in 1940 in Sevilla, Spain, Yruegas already at a young age showed signs of an artistic talent.
After high school he focused on courses in the field of linguistics and architecture, studying at the Colegio Padres Escolapios and at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura of the University of Sevilla.
In France he visited the Université Rouen Normandie located in Mont Saint Aignan, where he qualified in French language and literature.
After these studies he obtained a scholarship to study the Abasi architecture in Iraq, a specific variety of architecture that originated in Baghdad and via Damascus arrived in Spain. Yruegas stayed for some 18 months in Baghdad, where he also was involved in projects to realize single-family houses, created some sculptures that were included in a local modern art museum and supplied articles to Spanish (art) magazines.
Once returned to Spain he published a book about the Iraqi sculptor Mun'im Furat: El Extraño Mundo de Mun'im Furat (Escultor) (The Strange World of Mun'im Furat (Sculptor)), 1975.
In a review of this book in a Spanish magazine, Yruegas was introduced as "... esperitu cultivado, sensible y noblemente, inquieto, artista, critico de arte, poeta,amante y cultivador de las sciencias biológica....." (a cultivated spirit, sensitive and nobly, restless, artist, art critic, poet, lover and cultivator of biological sciences), in short: someone with a broad cultural interest.
In the late 1970s Yruegas and his wife got the idea to find out if they could continue their lives at Fuerteventura. They went there, but in Puerto del Rosario, the capital of the island, there were no houses to rent, so after some days in a hotel, they left for Corralejo, where they could rent a house.
They probably soon felt at home, while Yruegas also had noted that from this location he could do his work as an architect.
So after some time the couple bought the house, where they currently still live, located at the end of the Avenida Corralejo Grandes Playas in Corralejo, near the community's large beach.
Yruegas turned out to be a man of many talents, besides being an architect he is a painter, sculptor, photographer, poet and writer. In that last capacity he published, among others Escrite en Fuerteventura, 1978-1998, published in 1995.
And then he also transformed the area around his house into an art environment
It began as a whim, Yruegas said in an interview in December 2017.
Asked why he made these specific creations, he said:
“For my personal pleasure, it's like a joke. I am an architect and I'm very rational and minimalist while designing houses, but with this Villa I can have fun, entertain me and enjoy my own art.”
And indeed, already for the passers-by there is a lot to enjoy from the street.
One sees a long white wall that separates house and garden from the street and on that wall there are colorful scenes with sculptures partially sunk into the wall, such as those with two mermaids against a blue background (as in the top picture).
One can also see from the street that in the area behind the wall, the walled garden, there are structures that rise high above the wall
This art environment includes a number of sculptures that characterize people in all kinds of capacities. Some have been created on the basis of mannequins which Yruegas acquired and subsequently processed (That's why he sometimes is called the "artist of the mannequins.")
Yruegas apparently enjoyed creating all sorts of surreal scenes, such as an arm emerging from a hole in a green surface with a bell, or a lady consisting of a head and two legs appearing on a predominantly blue wall, and various other comparable scenes. .
The walled garden of the site includes, in addition to a beautiful green plantation and many colorful decorations and sculptures, a number of raised structures, such as a square tower-like red structure, an elongated panel with transparent circles flanked in front and behind by mannequins watching and a large weather vane with a triangular wind catcher.
Currently (May 2019) in his late seventies,Yruegas is still active in maintaining the site, although it is quite a lot of work. Documentation * WeblogHérault Insolite (May 3, 2019) with a series of pictures
* Article (December 2017) on the websiteCorralejo Info with a large series of photos
* Interview in Fuerteventura Magazine, nr 97 (june 2014), p 27 (available on ISSUU)
Videos * Video (December 2014, 7'40") by Akinoryvy
* Video (December 2017, 3'57") by Time Beat (some shots appear more than once)
picture courtesy of Trymanit (Flickr, September 2009)
Oreste Fernando Nannetti (1927-1994) is known because of an enormous graffiti he carved into the cement of an outside wall of the psychiatric institution in Volterra, Italy, where he was hospitalized. The creation, made between 1959 and 1972, was some 180 m long and some 1.20 m high.
Life and works
Nannetti has spent most of his life in institutions. He was born in Rome, never knew who his father was, and when he was seven, he already was included into a charitable institution. At the age of ten he came to live in an institution for people with a a mental handicap.
At the age of 21, in 1948, he had to appear in court because of insulting authorities. He was not formally sentenced, as he was declared to be psychiatric, so he was sent into a psychiatric institution in Rome.
In 1958 Nannetti was transferred to the psychiatric hospital in the city of Volterra, at that time one of the largest (and outdated) institutions in Italy.
Here, in 1959, he began making his creation on the wall. Having no instruments, he used the buckle of his belt to carve the drawings and texts into the plaster.
picture from the weblog Lema Sabachthani
(not available anymore)
Nannetti also has produced texts and drawings on paper made by pen and ink, some 1700 altogether, combined into a large book. These creations have gone lost, being burned, together with some personal belongings after he left the hospital. However, of this creation photocopies have been made.
He also has decorated a 106 m long guard rail, but this one has definitely disappeared.
picture courtesy of Astrid Berglund
In his works Nannetti, who preferred to refer to himself as NOF4 or Nanof, evokes an imaginary world. He depicts himself as an astral colonel or an astronautic mining engineer and he tells stories about cosmic travels, conquests of imaginary countries, telepathic cosmic connections, magical powers and fantastic impersonations, all together creating his own fantasy world, of which he himself is one of the main characters.
After he was discharged from the clinic in 1973 Nannetti settled in the city of Volterra, where he died in 1994. I have not found information about the way he earned a living during the last twenty years of his life.
Saving what has remained of the creation
In 1978 the Italian government made the rather drastic decision to close all large psychiatric institutions in the country. This also concerned the institute in Volterra, which was closed in 1979.
Aldo Trafeli, who worked as a nurse in the hospital and who had recognized the significance of Nannetti's inscriptions, made sure that they were photographed (by Pier Nello Manoni -see documentation).
After the institute was closed, the buildings just have been left as they were. The graffiti wall became neglected and meanwhile about half of the plaster has gone.
Although there always have been people who were interested in this work, as it was seen as a rather authentic specimen of art brut, only from around 2010 there was more general interest. Pleas to save the work appeared in writing and on videos and a non-profit organisation was formed (Inclusione Graffio & Parole) to save what has been left of the graffiti.
A piece of 8 meters of wall with inscriptions has now been saved and restored
Expositions
In 2010, from September 3 until October 3, Nannetti's creations could be seen at an exposition of (graffitied and textual) outsider art in the city of Genova, Museoteatro della Commenda di Pré, curated by Gustavo Giacosa of the association ContemporArt
In 2011 the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne had an exposition about Nannetti's work (May 13 - October 30). The catalog of this expo had contributions of Lucienne Peiry, Antonio Tabucchi, Anne Lovell, Pier Nello Manoni, Ilario Rossi, Vincent Capt and Jessica Schupbach. It came with a 7 m long unfoldable page and a 20 min video.
Situation in 2022
Above picture was made by Tiramisu Bootfighter in July 2022 during a trip he made in the context of his projectLa Valise, Galerie Ambulante. The photo shows that the decorations on the wall are still in reasonable condition, but gradually decaying.
Documentation
* Mino Trafeli & Pier Nello Manoni(photo's), NOF4, Il libro della vita, 1984 (Ed. del Cerro)
* A film by Pier Nello and Erika Manoni, I graffiti della mente, 20’, italian, undertitles in french or english, Produced by Blue Films, Rome, 2002. (Available on DVD)
* Lucienne Peiry, "Il soliloquio lapidario di Nannetti", in: Quaderni d' altri tempi #64 (2016) (this article is the re-edited introduction to the catalog of the 2011 exposition in the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne)
* A fotoseries on Flickr by Carlo Tardani (uploaded May 2011) about the abandoned psychiatric hospital
* Article on SPACES website (2012)
* Book by Lucienne Peiry, Le livre de Pierre (The stone book). Paris (Allia Ed), 2020, with pictures of drawings by Nannetti and photographs by Pierre Nello Manoni and Mario del Curto
Videos
* Video byFederico Formica, Salvate il graffiti dell follia (5'50", 2010, Vimeo)
* Trailer on YouTube to promote the photo exposition NOF4, E' fantascienza, non follia! (2010) by Francesco Cortonesi, Abramo de Licio, Silvia Baglioni
* Video by Pier Nello Manoni (4'44", YouTube, January 2019), entry for the 2019 Raw Vision short film competition
first published August 2010, last revised July 2022
Oreste Fernando Nannetti I Graffiti di NOF4 Volterra, Toscane, Italy gradually decaying
visiting:
the website Manicomio di Volterra, with all kinds of information about the history of and writings about the hospital, has a reference at the end of the main page to options of a guided visit to Volterra
