Edvin Hevonkoski, Edvininpolku / Edvin`s Path

picture from the website postfuturism.org

Life and works

Edvin Hevonkoski (1923-2009) was born in Alavus and lived in his later years in the city of Vaasa, Finland, where he had a job as a sheet metal worker.

Retired in 1982 at almost age sixty he began a new career: making sculptures, first from wood, later on from scrap metal.

Active for many years, Hevonkoski all together has made some 300 creations. He impersonated famous people, such as the president of Finland and characters from classic (Nordic) stories.

sculpture along the trail (from Bogartsblogg)

His house became too small for his production and mrs Hevonkoski probably was not amused by so many items around, so he decided to display the sculptures along a 1300 m long jogging trail that runs through the wooded area near his house.

I understand that it took some time before the local authorities realized what was going on there in the woods and once they did, they just let it happen.

Finnish president Tanja Halonen (2000-2006)
picture from weblog joce.blogit.kauppalehti.fi

On September 8, 2009, Edvin Hevonkoski died.

this picture and the next one (2018) by Sophie Lepetit 

Future of the site

It is not clear who in the future will take care of the collection. The city of Vaasa has not yet decided what to do. Some years ago a local group asked the city council to take measures to establish kind of a museum to house the creations. This suggestion however got a negative advise from local art experts, mainly because of the financial aspects.

Expositions
* In another world, Kiasma, Helsinki, 2005

Documentation 

* Series of pictures on Vaasapedia
* On Bogartsblogg (October 2011) a series of pictures of the sculptures along the trail
* Article and pictures on the ITE-taide website
* On Sophie Lepetit's weblog an article, a series of pictures and one more series of pictures (November 2018)

Videos
* A video The path of Edvin made by Klas Fransberg (2010, 19'59", subtitled in English) is available on the website Culture Unplugged (cannot be embedded here)
* Video (YouTube, 6'42", uploaded May 2011) showing activities in restoring sculptures along the trail (in Finnish)

* Video by Mira House (YouTube, 5'00", uploaded November 2011) showing Hevonkoski's sculptures and other creations

Edvin Hevonkoski

Edvininpolku

Aleksis Kiventie 59 (here the trail begins)
65300 Vaasa, Ostrobothnia, Western and Central Finland
can be visited freely by walking along the trail

Arja Alhoranta, Elk garden

picture (around 2008?) 

courtesy of Minna Haveri  

Pyhäranta is a Finnish community of some 2000 inhabitants in the province of Western Finland, part of the Southwest Finland region.

Life and works

Arja Alhoranta was born in 1937 as the youngest of a farmers family living in the rural part of the community. Her father died when she was a year and a half old. Soon also world war II broke out, and the family had to live rather modestly.

As a result, Arja Alhoranta had to start working at a rather young age and was unable to obtain further training after her primary education.

She worked in the insurance business and in one of her other jobs she became familiar with working with concrete.

this picture and the next three (2018) 

courtesy of Sophie Lepetit

Doing domestic work at home made her realize that this type of work does not deliver anything lasting. This increased her motivation to make sculptures, where her experience with concrete came in handy. 

So Arja Alhoranta developed into a non-professional artist of allure, with the ability to turn some cheap material into something beautiful, such as the horse on her right side in the first picture. 

This horse is one of the many creations she made by just applying concrete to a model made from simple iron wire. 

Her favourite is the elk. Altogether she made eight sculptures of elks and six of horses. 

But she also has created penguins, dogs, swans, other birds......

And she also made wooden creations, as in above picture, by manipulating big tree stumps with a chain saw, in this way producing large totems.

Her work is displayed in the wooded area around her house in Ihode, a hamlet of Pyhäranta.

Arja Alhoranta also made a variety of small-scale items that are located indoors, such as painted murals, oil paintings, leather work and creations of porcelain.

Documentation

* article and pictures on the ITE-taide website
* entries (August 2018) in the weblog of Sophie Lepetit: here and here

* article (August 2019) in regional newspaper Raumalainen

first published July 2009, last revised June 2020

Arja Alhoranta

Elk garden
Karjassilta 4
27320 Ihode, Pyhäranta, province Western Finland, region South-West Finland
streetview

Joseph Duffour, La montagne aux coquillages / The mountain with shells

all pictures courtesy of Sandrine Pangaud

Some art environments made by non-professionals get a lot of publicity on the internet. Try "facteur Cheval" on Google and you will get a lot of hits. Of course, I also wrote about Cheval's unbelievable creation, but my special attention goes to the lesser known sites.

Apart from some articles in the local press, Joseph Duffour's creation has been presented only in the French magazine Zon`art, nr 8 (published early 2003, not available anymore on internet). The article is by Jean-Michel Chesné, who gave me his friendly permission to draw on his material. And then in March 2010, I came into contact with a member of Duffour's family, who provided me with some more information ¹.

Life and works

Joseph Duffour (1922-2021) was born in the community of Marin, near Thourou-les-Bains, in the Haute-Savoie department of France.

He had a job at the French railway company SNCF, from which he retired in 1977.

The family doesn't not know what inspired him when in 1963 Duffour began transforming the garden around his house in the community of Saint Gervais into an art environment.

It became a project that would keep him busy for the rest of his life, working many hours, sometimes day and night in what he himself called his rocailles (rockies).

This resulted in a variety of constructions in concrete, decorated with shells, glass mosaic, small statues and all kind of recuperated materials.

Like Duffour's relative wrote me: "He uses any object that can inspire him, wherefrom he makes a concrete cast (doll, mask, sometimes even boxes of Nesquick) and he integrates these casts in concrete blocks, decorated with tiles, stones and shells, he has collected on the [...] coast".

The rising structures include shrines with small sculptures of the virgin Mary and saints, among whom St Joseph. 

The site has a small area provided with some benches, where one can sit quietly and can overview the beautiful landscape, watch the sunset and enjoy the majestic scenery of the French Alps. Duffour's place of living, Saint-Gervais, is a well-known skiing resort in the Mont Blanc-area in the Haute Savoie department.

Duffour apparently was not inspired by -or maybe even did not know about- other self-taught artists who made art environments: "Facteur Cheval? I do not know him, have never seen him in my life..." , he told Jean-Michel Chesné in 2003.

In 2005, however, he paid a visit to the Palais Ideal and remarked that he considered his own creation to be completely different from the one by Cheval, what obviously is a correct observation.

No public visits

Joseph Duffour was a modest man. He has not made his creation to arouse interest from the general public, nor has he tried to get publicity, although the site got publicity in local/regional journals, like it also was shown on regional television.

The site is not open to the public and I will refrain from giving an address.

In his early nineties, Joseph Duffour had become too old to take care of his art environment. He died in 2021, at age 98.

Documentation

* On Facebook Sophie Lepetit published a large series of photos of Duffour's creations

note
¹The site is included in Bruno Montpied's inventory of French art environments Le gazouillis des éléphants, 2017, with a review that is based upon Chesné's article.

first published June 2009, last revised April 2025

Joseph Duffour
La montagne aux coquillages
74170 Saint Gervais, dept Haute-Savoy, region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France
private, not open for the public

Jan-Erik Svennberg, Lilla Istanbul / Little Istanbul

this picture and the next one (July 2007) 

courtesy of Mats Karlsson 

Life and works

Already as a young man Jan-Erik Svennberg (born December 13, 1944) from the city of Sala in Sweden, became interested in the culture of Turkey. During his service in the army he taught himself some Turkish by means of Swedish-Turkish dictionary. When he was around age thirty he began making his first small wooden replicas of Turkish buildings.

The event that would influence his life happened in 1979 when he made a group trip to Bulgar. He then could make a three-day trip to Istanbul and although he was a bit confused by the bustle of the city, he became fascinated by it's atmosphere. He especially was impressed by the mosques he had visited.

Back home Svennberg began making a large-scale replica of a mosque, which he displayed in the garden of the house in Sala where he lived with his parents. His father was a bit afraid that the neighbors wouldn't be amused by this activity, but this turned out better then expected. Over the years there was actually no comment, not negative, but not positive as well....

Beginning around 1979, Svennberg meanwhile has made some twenty models of different sizes, which he all displayed in the garden around the house.

Apart from making these creations, Svennberg also was interested in various aspects of Turkish cultural life, reading stories about Turkish history and about famous Turkish personalities, which he also depicted in paintings, as the picture below shows.

this picture and the next three (2014) 
courtesy of Simon Turner

Around 2010, when Svennberg had reached his mid sixties, he stopped to make constructions. After his parents had passed away, he lived alone in the parental home, taking care of his creations and meeting visitors from various countries around the world. They are welcome on appointment.

In Sweden people know about Svennberg's work, also because in 2007 he appeared in the popular
TV-series 100 höjdare (100 highlights), 2004-2008. 

interior of the blue-colored mosque

Svennberg's passion for mosques is architecturally and aesthetically inspired and has no relation whatever with the public debate in European countries about Islam in western society.

A mosque in Sala's city park

In April 2013 on a small island in Sala's city park a model of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem made by Svennberg, was unveiled.

the Rock Mosque
picture from a touristic leaflet, not available anymore

In august 2013 this replica was fully destroyed by a probably deliberately caused fire.

As reported by a local journal, around the turn of the year 2017/2018, the municipality of Sala bought a new replica of the Rock Mosque that Svennberg had made.

picture by an unknown photographer

It was exposed in the summer of 2018, but then it was stored in a depot. The group Lilla Istanbul Friends hopes that the municipality soon will find a safe indoor location where the public can see it.

Exposition

From December 1, 2018 until January 12, 2019 the Aguéli Museet in Sala presented Svennberg's artwork, including a number of his paintings of well known Turkish personalities.

at the exposition
picture from Facebook (European Outsider Art Association)

Documentation
* Lilla Istanbul on Facebook (since July 2017)

* Svennberg's work was featured, together with creations of other Nordic self-taught artists, in an exposition Annan Konst (Other Art), which in 2009 and 2010 traveled through Sweden, Norway and Finland.

Video
* Video by Mushabbar (August 2021, YouTube, 2'30")

first published June 2009, last revised February 2022

Jan-Erik Svennberg

Lilla Istanbul

Annedal 100

73336 Sala, Sweden

can be visited on appointment

Jean Crampilh-Broucaret, Le plancher de Jeannot / Jeannot´s floor

picture courtesy of Samuel Guitton, 2 Koc,
the company that made the frames

The three panels above since July 2007 marked  the entrance of the (psychiatric) Hôpital Sainte Anne in Paris. Together, they once formed a wooden floor of about fifteen m², engraved with a message of eighty lines by a young man who for many years was referred to as Jeannot le Béarnois.

Around 2023, the panels were removed because the Mahhsa museum, which is linked to the Centre Hospitalier Saint-Anne, intended to restore them to their former state. This is explained in more detail on the museum's website (see documentation), which also mentions the name of the creator of the inscriptions on the floor, namely Jean Crampilh-Broucaret, mostly adressed as Jeannot.

The story

Jeannot was born in 1939 in a small community in the former Béarn department, in the south of France, where his parents owned a (farm)house on a terrain of some 40 hectares. As a young man, he may have been a nice, sociable person, but problems arose when in 1959 he had to deal with his fathers suicide.

His mother, Jeannot and one of his sisters continued to live in the house, and the small family gradually became more and more isolated.

Jeannot showed paranoid behavior. Admission in a psychiatric hospital was imposed, but he resisted so violently that authorities did not further intervene. When the mother died in 1971, permission was granted to bury her in the house, "under the staircase", as is reported in articles about Jeannot.

The next months Jeannot wrote down a text on the wooden floor of the living room. With a hand drill he made small holes which he connected with lines cut out with a gouge or a knife, in this way giving shape to the text in capital. Carving eighty lines of text must have entailed many months of intensive labor.

Soon after completing this job, Jeannot died; maybe he had starved himself to death (1972). Together with his mother he was buried in the local cemetery

The sister continued living in the house, alone, isolated, hardly coming outside. She was found dead in 1993.

The house was sold. The brocanteur who dealt with the furniture, noticed the inscriptions on the floor and informed someone of his family, named dr Guy Roux, a psychiatrist interested in art brut. Dr Roux became the owner of the floor in exchange for a brand new floor he paid the new owner of the house. Later he sold it to the pharmaceutical company Bristol Meyer Squib.

Expositions of the floor

The plancher for the first time was exposed in 2000 during an international psychiatric congress in Paris, as part of an exposition entitled 50 ans d´expression en milieu psychiatrique (50 years of expression in the psychiatric setting). 

Some years later the plancher was exposed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which gave rise to a heated public debate  about the question if it acceptable to present as a work of art what someone in great psychic need gave expression to.

Due also to the cooperation of Dr Jean Pierre Olié, professor of psychiatry and chief psychiatrist of Ste Anne Hospital, it was arranged that the floor, cut in three parts, from 2007 on was on display at the entrance of a department of the hospital in the rue Cabanis.

rue Cabanis (streetview)

There were plans to make the hospital more open by renovating the main entrance and there were ideas to situate the carved floor there, .but these did not produce any results in the short term.

Google Streetview shows that in July 2022 the panels with the text were still located along the rue Cabanis, but in April 2024 they were no longer there.

Exposition of the renovated floor from September 2024

As said above, the Mahhsa museum has taken care of a renovation of the floor with inscriptions. It will be exhibited from September 2024 to April 27, 2025. 

The museum is also publishing a book in which an attempt is made to restore the authenticity of the creation by analyzing its history and the social context of Jeannot's family and by examining which analyses have been made in the past thirty years with regard to the creation.

The text

The text as written on the floor can be found in French on the website Tryangle. When in May 2009 I wrote the first version of this post, I had not yet found an English translation, so I made one myself, that can be read in my website OEE texts.

Very briefly summarized, the message of the text is that religion is the cause of evil in society, and that the church uses electronic devices to influence the minds of men.

Documentation

* Website of the MAHHSA Museum

* Wikipedia
* Dr Guy Roux, Françoise Stijepovic (photo's), Histoire du plancher de Jeannot, drame de la terre ou puzzle de la tragédie, Éditions Encre et Lumière, 2005.

first published May 2009, last revised  September 2025

Le plancher de Jeannot 
originally located in a house in an unknown community in the dept Pyrénées-Atlantique, region Nouvelle Aquitaine, France
(during many years exposed along a street outside the hospital, 

removed around 2023 to be exposed in the Mahhsa museum)

Musée MAHHSA

Centre hospitalier Sainte-Anne

1 rue Cabanis

75014 Paris, France

streetview

Pierre Dange, Palais artistique / Artistic palace

  

 postcard courtesy of Bastiaan van der Velde ¹

Some people who made art environments are only known and remembered because of old picture postcards which portray them and their place of living.

The picture above is such an old postcard. It dates back from around 1910 and shows a house named Palais Artistique, which in former times existed in Rogny-les-sept-écluses, a small village of about 700 inhabitants in the center of France.

The house was constructed by someone named Pierre Dange. The postcard above ¹ has the name Dauge, but this probably is a mistake. French weblog Vasavoir-Afga (which focuses upon the community of Rogny) has a picture of the nameplate at the entrance of the demolished house, which reads Dange.

picture from the website vasavoir-afga

The story is that Dange constructed this house with his own hands, giving it a special appearance with its strange roof and the sturdy walls with just a few windows. The top of these walls have elements that in French are called meurtrières, small openings in a wall to observe enemy forces and shoot at them.

For Pierre Dange they had the function to defend the house "in case the Prussians would return ". Apart from other things, this could mean that anyhow the house was constructed after 1870, the year of the French-Prussian war.

The house was located in the higher parts of the rue Hugues Cosnier, a street that still exists in Rogny.

Here is another postcard with Dange posing as a painter. The portrait represents someone (a king, a queen?) with a crown.

Pierre Dange posing in front of a painting

(from the website vasavoir)  

Not much is known about Pierre Dange's activities as a painter. In his weblog (November 15, 2011), Bruno Montpied has presented a picture of a painting that may have been made by Dange. It suggests he worked in a naive style.

As said, the house doesn't exist anymore. And probably most of the current residents of Rogny have no memories of Pierre Dange either, maybe with the exception of an octogenarian lady who told Jean-Michel Chesné that she, at the age of around seven, visited him. At that time, around 1930, Pierre Dange already was a very old, not so friendly man, who lived in a distressed condition. As far as the lady remembers, there were no paintings around in the house.  

Rogny-les-sept-écluses by the way is known because of the construction of locks (seven on a row, like a staircase) in the Canal de Briare, digged between 1604 and 1642, to connect the Loire and the Seine rivers. This canal would provide the country with an interior waterway from the north to the Mediterranean v.v (Couldn´t resist to mention this, although it´s a topic for other blogs of course)

note

¹  this postcard was forwarded to me in February 2011 by Bastiaan van der Velde, thanks a lot!

first published May 2009, last revised August 2018

Pierre Dange
Palais Artistique
(formerly) Rogny-les-sept-écluses, dept Yonne, region Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, France

site doesn't exist anymore

Marcel Dhièvre, Au Petit Paris / At Little Paris

.

 pictures courtesy of Brigitte Rebollar, 
weblog de moi-a-vous

This facade of a former clothing store, a decorated exterior, is currently still present in Saint-Dizier, a town in the Champagne-Ardennes area in north-western France.

Life and works

Marcel Dhièvre (1898-1977), born in Laneuville-au-Pont, some 8 km east of Saint-Dizier in a family of agricultural workers, from birth on had the handicap that he could not use his right hand, since this one was paralyzed. Nevertheless he has become known because of the way he decorated the walls of his shop of clothing and related items on the Avenue de la République, a property he had bought in 1922.

The story of the decorations begins after World War II. Around 1950 Dhièvre made some mosaic decorations on the facade of the house in Eurville, outside Saint-Dizier, where he lived with Constance Coulasse he had married in 1937, after his first marriage (1920-1935) had failed.

Dhièvre apparently liked making these decorations and soon he shifted his attention to the facade of his shop in town.

He began decorating the shop's exterior with mosaics, little ornaments and representations of flowers, trees and birds. A number of mosaics refer to Parisian buildings, like the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Chambre des Députés.

Dhièvre also decorated the interior of the building with wall paintings and frescoes, and he made paintings on canvas in a naive style, which nowadays are in the collection of the local art museum

Marcel Dhièvre has continued this project until 1970.  He died in 1977.

 

Situation after Dhièvre died

After Dhièvre's death the house was sold to a new owner who was interested in saving it as an art environment. In 1984 the house was registered as a Monument Historique and in 1985 (January-April) the local museum had an exhibition of Dhièvre's artwork.

However, the new owner hadn't the necessary funds available and could not prevent some decay, like mosaics losing their colors and parts of them falling down.

 A local group of friends of the Little Paris, Entre Tenir, took action to promote the preservation of the decorations. With success, since in 2008 the mayor of Saint-Dizier announced that the city's budget for 2009 would allow the purchase of the property and start a renovation.

Restoration 2011-2012 

In 2009 the city bought Little Paris indeed and developed plans to restore it. The project was entrusted to Renaud Dubrigny, an employee of the city of Joinville who had a lot of experience in doing this kind of work.

The restoration project started in March 2011 and went well.

Renaud Dubrigny at work

In the weekend of September 17/18 2011, during the journées patrimoines (heritage days), the public for the first time in many years could take a look at the decorations in the interior. 

Inauguration and current use

The restored house was officially inaugurated on September 15, 2012, during the Journées du Patrimoine.

At this occasion the city published a website about the Petit Paris art environment (not available anymore). This website had an article by French art critic Laurent Danchin, which was republished in a translation into English in OEE texts.

For a couple of years it it remained unclear how the renovated building could be used, until in late 2017 it was announced that it would become kind of a cultural café, which might be a good use indeed.

In July 2019 it was announced that this cafe would open as Bar au Petit Paris in September 2019. A Facebook page meanwhile has become available. Here is a report by French TV (July 2019) about the re-opening of the site:

 

More documentation

* the website Habitants-paysagistes (Lille Art Museum, from March 2018 on) has a variety of pictures by Francis David (no dates) and l'Aracine (1981-1996) and also documentary panels by Rene Escard (1970-1996)
* article on the website of the municipality of Saint-Dizier 
* pictures of the exterior on the weblogs of Sophie Lepetit and of Brigitte Rebollar

* pictures of paintings by Marcel Dhièvre, mostly done in a naive style, in the collection of the local museum
* article by Laurent Danchin, translated into English and republished in OEE-texts

* article by Dr Tony Shaw (September 2021) on his weblog

Video

* video of the renovation by Voix de la Haute Marne (Daily Motion, 3'47")

first published May 2009, last revised September 2022

Marcel Dhièvre
au Petit Paris
avenue de la République 476
52100 Saint-Dizier, dept Haute-Marne, region Grand Est, France
(Champagne-Ardenne area)
can be seen from the street 

streetview (September 2021)