It’s Day 78…two more paintings away from 80 paintings.  Wow, I can’t believe I have made it this far. 🙂  Today I realized how riddled I am with anxiety and stress.  Well, I’ve known for quite a while, but today I think I’m hitting my upper limit.  I feel physically stressed and the thoughts in my mind aren’t helping.  Today’s artist is a perfect one for how I’m feeling today so join me in celebrating Art Brut artist Alexandra Huber!  I love her work.

Bored with her work-a-day life, Alexandra Huber (b. 1955) began painting around 1990 — at home, after work and with no formal training. Her work was first shown in her hometown of Munich, Germany in 1992 and in very little time she became one of Europe’s most acclaimed and sought after self-taught artists. In the ensuing ten years, Huber’s work has grown larger and more complex.

Her large canvases often contain smaller drawings collaged into them. And she

finds arresting new ways of using her “Esperanto of signs.” Using childlike stick figures as a symbolic “Nobody” she imbues her works with intense emotional content, “intangible, because incorporeal, he is the ideal protagonist for all human lamenting, suffering, hoping, and thinking. What Nobody will admit to, ‘Nobody’ has done. What everyone wishes, ‘Nobody’ expresses.” Alexandra

Huber is a major talent whose work gets deeper and stronger with time. She has shown in major galleries all over Europe and America. Her work garnered tremendous attention at the New York City Outsider Art Fair in recent years. Her first museum show will be in the Fall of 2002 in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Biography is from www.headfooters.com.

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“Alexandra Huber’s oeuvre is characterized by an apparent Esperanto of signs. It is not an art of the unconscious. The human being and the often puzzling order of things are her major theme. The figures in her art are interpreted by the objects around them as aggressive, painful, threatened or else whimsical, witty, clownish.

She symbolically loads them up and unloads them sentimentally, organically,

historically. She fills them up and empties them out with allusions, gestures, thoughts, speculations, wishes, fears, anger and pain but also with wit and irony. The feelings are always in between states, never fixed, never categorical. These spiritual feelings, usually decisions between pro and con, or else ‘indifferent’, are the actual subject matter.

Her ominous painted figure, perhaps an ‘alter ego,’ of ‘Hercules at the crossroads,’ can best be explained as ‘nobody.’ Intangible, because incorporeal, he is the ideal protagonist for all human lamenting, suffering, hoping and thinking. What nobody will admit to, ‘nobody’ has done. What everyone wishes, ‘nobody’ expresses. Her works or art revolve around the meaning, humor and

tragedy of human existence. It is an existence that even the pages of a sketchbook cannot reduce in grandeur. It is always conceived monumentally. Her paintings are intended on the one hand to be shocking and provocative, and on the other to be read and empathized with. They deliberately negate the slightest suggestion of solidity and smoothness. The hard, scruffy, infantile brushstroke reflects and awareness of life that ignores social taboos, approaches problems with an exploring touch and exposes deplorable states of affairs, no matter how small or how big.”

 

Johannes van Megen (art critic)- From www.artbrut.com

 

I had no problem figuring out what I was going to paint for my Huber tribute.  It’s a sad painting for me, but it was also therapeutic to paint it.  This past year has been a tragic one where on most days I can deal with everything, but today was especially hard.  These are the days I’m grateful for my friends, husband, dogs, art, music and painting in my life!  If I didn’t have those things I don’t know what I’d do.  Now to just work on my anxiety!  I recently had a talk with a friend about how artists and creative types tend to have a lot of anxiety.  Maybe I need to write more since I’m so good at manifesting stories in my mind.  Ha.  Thanks for listening to my rant and I hope you enjoy my painting.  I’ll see you tomorrow on day 79!  Best, Linda