c. 1996 Religion News Service

BALTIMORE (RNS)-Gerald Hawkes is an artist whose internal dialogue prompts him to paste together thousands-sometimes millions-of painted wooden matchsticks, producing creations he said reflect a struggle between God and Satan to speak through him.

Each matchstick, said the 52-year-old Hawkes, a former printer left partially disabled by a mugging some 12 years ago, represents an individual soul. Combining them in his art, he added,”shows the love and beauty we could produce if we only worked together.” Hawkes’ work falls into the genre known as visionary art, a name applied to the idiosyncratic creations of self-taught artists who tend to lead hard lives beyond the pale of polite society. If art is indeed a window into the soul, perhaps no genre reveals as much of the artist’s soul as does visionary art.

The religious intensity of Hawkes’ work is common to visionary art-also known as outsider or intuitive art-now enjoying a new level of appreciation with the recent opening here of the nation’s first museum devoted entirely to the genre. Hawkes, who lives in Baltimore, is one of more than 100 artists whose 400 paintings, sculptures, bas reliefs and multi-media works are on display at the new American Visionary Art Museum.

Fittingly, the museum sits on the wrong side of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, separated from the area’s popular tourist attractions by a finger of the Chesapeake Bay. The museum is housed in two turn-of-the-century buildings, one of which is a barn-like structure used to display oversized sculpture.

In a courtyard between the two buildings is a 55-foot-tall whirligig with hundreds of moveable parts that conveys visionary art’s purely whimsical side. The brightly colored structure is the creation of 76-year-old Vollis Simpson, who has been building whirligigs for the past decade on land near his home in rural Lucama, N.C.”Visionary art is a manifestation of the basic human urge to create,”said John Maisel, editor of the London-based quarterly art journal Raw Vision.”It is created with little or no commercial intent and has no function other than to satisfy a personal need.” That is not to say collectors are unwilling to pay big bucks for visionary art. Hawkes has sold a matchstick table that measured five feet in diameter for more than $7,000. His heads of women, also made of matchsticks, routinely go for more than $1,500.

Each January, a visionary-art fair attracts dealers and collectors from around the globe to New York’s trendy Soho district. Visionary art is particularly popular in Europe, where several museums are devoted to it. In Brazil, a visionary-art museum displays only the work of institutionalized artists.”It’s almost like the last undiscovered area of art,”said Maisel.”Of course, to discover it is to despoil it in a way that could affect the work. But does that mean the artists shouldn’t have a chance to earn a decent income from their labors?” The intense spirituality often evident in visionary art stems in large measure from the struggles of the artists themselves, said Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, the Baltimore museum’s founder and president.

Visionary art is generally the work of individuals who lead difficult-sometimes troubled-lives outside the mainstream. It’s practitioners are often uneducated or reclusive, offbeat or obsessive. Some live in institutions-hospitals, prisons, nursing homes. In all cases, they are individuals freed of convention by their ignorance of the standards of the contemporary art establishment.

Visionary art generally differs from folk art by not being tied to a particular culture or having any practical application. It differs from another genre known as naive or primitive art-not to be confused with tribal art-in that visionary art does not always attempt to portray scenes realistically, whereas primitive art generally does.

Hoffberger said visionary art”is looking for the holy in everyday life, in the objects that surround us. It’s work of the spirit, not necessarily in any acceptable church framework, but in terms of the real conflicts that people have.”It is not a sugar-coated spirituality. It’s the spirituality of people who really listen to their inner voices, even when that voice would seem odd to others.” One visionary artist is the Rev. Albert Wagner, a storefront preacher in East Cleveland, Ohio, who has turned his home into a chaotic work of art he calls”The People Love People House of God.”The home’s exterior is decorated with bits and pieces of found objects cast off by others as junk. The interior is crammed with sculptures. Wagner counsels the members of his small congregation in the midst of this jumble.

His work is represented at the museum by a six-by-three-foot wood board covered with hundreds of objects-African artifacts and Christian and Muslim symbols among them-looking like some sort of fossilized junkyard. He calls the work”City Beneath the Sea.”(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

The nation’s most famous example of visionary art is probably the nearly 100-foot-tall Watts Towers, a reinforced concrete structure decorated with ceramics, glass and tile in central Los Angeles. It’s creator, Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant construction worker, spent 33 years building the towers, now included on the National Register of Historic Places.”The most common vocabulary of visual art is to take bits of glass and shells and whatever and cover ordinary space with it,”said Hoffberger, whose plans for the still-unfinished, $7 million museum include covering the outside walls of the facility’s main building in a similar style. Visitors to the museum, which opened in late November, are being asked to donate their broken glass, pottery, ceramic and shells.

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Many of the images employed by visionary artists are overtly Christian-a suffering Jesus on the cross or the end of time as depicted in the Book of Revelation are favorite motifs.

Maisel said the widespread use of Christian motifs is a hallmark of American visionary art.”Religion in the U.S. is more accessible than it is in Europe, where the big C church establishment cornered the market on religious expression for so long,”he said.”In the U.S., particularly in the Bible Belt, religion has a more informal quality, allowing for individualized expression characterized by the many small Baptist-style churches. That rubs off on artists.”That’s why so much of American visionary art is like a visual sermon.” The most common religious motif in visionary art is the Garden of Eden, said Hoffberger, which is why the museum’s first exhibit-“The Tree of Life”-is based on that theme.”So much of visionary art is literally an attempt by the artist to create a form of heaven on earth, to create the unspoiled Garden in their very own back yard,”she said.”In a sense, it’s an attempt by the artists to create an alternative reality for themselves.”

MJP END RIFKIN