Arty Farty Friday ~ Adolf Wölfli, Outsider Artist.

There's a post from earlier this year about an Outsider Artist, George Widener, here.
A look at another "Outsider" today:
Adolf Wölfli.

Adolf Wölfli, born on 29 February 1864 near Bern, Switzerland, suffered an horrendous childhood: mentally and physically abused, orphaned early, failed attempts in a variety of manual work roles, and some army service brought on withdrawal and social isolation. Aged 26 he was imprisoned for his attempted molestation of two young girls; then aged 31, after molesting a 3-year old girl he was committed for life to Waldau, a mental institution near Bern, and diagnosed as being schizophrenic. After 4 years in the asylum he began to draw.

This 3 minute video shows a few examples of Wolfli's art, and musical composition. Many more are at Google Image .

Some detail taken from a 1989 article in the LA Times by Kristine McKenna follows.

ART REVIEW : Adolf Wolfli: His Art Emerged From Madness

....He began to pour out the tormented workings of his memory and imagination onto paper. Drawing and writing obsessively, this untrained novice who'd had no known exposure to art hammered out a visual vocabulary of such originality and power that his body of work stands as one of the cornerstones of Outsider Art (the popular designation for art created by persons who, either by choice or fate, are isolated from society). Working up until his death in 1930, Wolfli completed 25,000 pieces and went through several distinct periods.

The first thing one notices about Wolfli's work is how suffocatingly dense it is. Walking a tightrope between picturing and manic patterning, Wolfli constructed labyrinthine mazes with no point of entry or exit. Pulsating with organic life, his patterning--which employs everything from clock hands and buildings to snails and birds--is evocative of musculature one minute, an illuminated manuscript the next.

Executed in plain and colored pencil on newsprint that was bound into books, Wolfli's largely autobiographical art was essentially an attempt to mythologize himself. Interspersing real facts from his life with fantastic tales of adventure that constituted the life he longed for, Wolfli chronicled scientific explorations and pleasure trips, personal disasters and redemption, tales of war and reconciliation.

Encrusted with musical notation and beautifully scripted German text, his drawings also feature maps of cities from around the world, an occult numbering system, ideas for social and political reform, and investment strategies with interest calculations. Wolfli had a highly pronounced sense of order, and his detailed renderings of elaborately developed systems are widely interpreted as his defense against his chaotically schizophrenic interior life. Simultaneously perceiving himself as a persecuted child, an intellectual giant and a god, Wolfli had several different signatures for his work, including "Cast-Off Accident," "St. Adolf-Great-Great-God," and "Grim Casualty"; three or more of his identities often appear on the same drawing.

Empty space terrified Wolfli and he rarely used perspective or attempted to depict three-dimensional forms in space, because such forms imply a surrounding emptiness. Ascending balloons, a favorite recurring motif, represent Wolfli's yearning for heaven, but alas, Wolfli had no faith that his sins would be forgiven and his balloons always plummet to earth. Unsociable and plagued by hallucinatory voices that were often violent, Wolfli gave further evidence of his conflicted inner life in his depiction of himself; the eyes of the male figure who appears in most of the drawings are dark, hooded and filled with fear.

One of the many astonishing things about Wolfli's work is the fact that while all of his work bears his unmistakable stamp, no two works are remotely alike. The tonal range he got out of a simple lead pencil is astonishing, as is his feverishly inventive imagination. He had no musical training, yet he composed reams of music over the course of his life, and productions using Wolfli's richly cadenced text as librettos have been staged in Europe and the United States. Though he had no more than rudimentary training in math, numbers fascinated him and "Wolfli the Allgebrahtor," as he dubbed himself, devised impossibly complex formulas and equations.

In 1915, Wolfli began constructing collages that combined his drawings with images cut from popular periodicals, and his unerring sense of composition really shines in these remarkably modern-looking works.

ASTROLOGY

Born on 29 February 1864, Bern, Switzerland. Chart set for 12 noon - time of birth unknown.

The Grand Trine in Air signs linking Mercury, Uranus and Saturn offers a hint that Wolfli would always have had a good measure of mental acuity, however his life pattern had unfolded. His early background of abuse would have affected this in ways we cannot properly imagine. A close sextile between Venus (planet of the arts) in Aquarius and Neptune (planet of creativity) in Aries led his gravitation to art during his long incarceration. Another close sextile, this between Sun (self) and Pluto (darkness), can be linked by two quincunx aspects to Saturn (work) in Venus-ruled Libra - which does kind of describe the way he was able to channel his own darkness through working on his art.

Without a time of birth Moon's exact position can't be established, nor can his rising sign and degree.

UPDATED chart showing position of Chiron:

Four more examples of his work:

Arty Farty Friday ~ George Widener, Gifted "Outsider"

Stumbling upon a couple of articles discussing what's known as "Outsider Art" (see Wikipedia), I discovered George Widener, self-taught artist and calendar savant, whose Asperger/Autism Spectrum Disorder syndrome developed into a passion for mathematical computation, statistics, data, and especially calendars. An obsessive habit to translate every number that he encountered into a calendar date led to his transforming his findings into artwork.

George Widener was born in Covington, Kentucky, USA. His childhood was scarred by his father's death when George was 9 years old, followed by his mother's alcoholism and confinement in an institution. By age of twelve he was living with grandparents, later with with an aunt. He attended a specialised school where he showed definite aptitudes for mental arithmetic and drawing, and exceptional memory capacity.

In 1979 he joined the US Air Force as a technician. He spent his free time drawing, and collecting ideas for future artwork. Subsequently, unstable psychological episodes led to stays in psychiatric institutions.

"While George Widener suffers from a certain form of autism, he also possesses outstanding computational skills and extraordinary memory for names, facts and dates. His artistic work deals with complex inventories, diagrams, charts, codes and ciphers, which he inscribes in ink upon paper napkins, pasted together in multiple layers. Widener’s accumulations of calendar dates appear as an attempt at finding some sort of regulating principle, an occult formula of universal causality, his own answer to the enigma of Infinity and Eternity."
From Art Brut

In 1994 Widener began studying liberal arts at the University of Tennessee. He now lives in Asheville, North Carolina. As an introverted young adult he could hardly have predicted a career for himself in the elitist world of contemporary art, but his casual doodles on napkins and scraps of paper in libraries and restaurants – scribbles which, at times, seemed to explain and/or predict a plane crash or other event - eventually drew attention.

Widener has stated (see HERE):

"[In my art] I am using the dates as the medium. I wondered if I could create a pattern of [dates of] disasters or of weather, and start predicting. Hypothetically, if everything adds up but there is one [date] missing and a future date fits in, does that mean there will be storms? That fascinated me.

I began to get a bit obsessed with things like numbers as a child. They calmed me down in my times of stress. I sort of regressed. I started to retreat. I was filling my notebooks up with the dates. I had dozens of notebooks in a backpack.

Eventually, I was put in hospital and diagnosed with Asperger/Autism Syndrome, after which I became more able to accept myself and control my obsession with dates. I consider certain 'runs' of numbers in dates to be telling a undiscovered story. These runs will eventually say something to future machine life forms, and I am always looking"

ASTROLOGY

Most sources give George Widener's year of birth only: 1962. Wikipedia states his date of birth as 8 February 1962, with a reference to source as follows:

Darold A. Treffert, Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010) p179.

How reliable that information is I can't tell, but if correct it's certainly significant, falling slap-bang in the midst of 1962's famous Aquarius mega-conjunction. Below is his natal chart using that date, at 12 noon, in Covington, Kentucky. Some sources state place of birth as Ohio - perhaps the discrepancy arises due to his enforced moves during childhood. His natal Moon's degree will not be as shown, and rising sign remains unknown without a birth time.

"A date", George Widener says, "has four variables: day, month, year, day of the week. Feeling the symmetry of these numbers, he says, is a beautiful experience, almost like a drug. Those who want that experience must pay the price". (HERE)

Words seem superfluous! All personal planets except Moon lie from mid- to late Aquarius, the Air sign astrology links to analytical skills, logic and general mental acuity. Moon would be in Aries, whatever time of day George Widener was born - that, along with Uranus, Aquarius' modern ruler in Leo adds a dynamic thrust to all that mental energy.

A thought occurs - if George Widener were to study astrology, then cast his amazing mind towards astrology research ...what might be revealed?

ARTWORK

George Widener's artwork must really require close-up viewing, but to give some idea, a few images chosen at random from Google Image

Widener notes that certain types of incidents have occurred on the same day of the week, and so that very day may engender similar incidents in the future. When Widener was a teenager, he came across a passenger list of the Titanic and discovered that one of the victims coincidentally shared his name. This large drawing translates his fascination for this history. Even though the ship sank on a Monday, here he emphasizes that it was “mourned on Tuesday.” Every Tuesday for seven hundred years, starting on April 16, 1912, is included by date; the number of Tuesdays approximately corresponds to the number of people rescued from the sinking ship. (See HERE)