The Electric Pencil by James Edward Deeds

Author:James Edward Deeds [Edward Deeds Jr., James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: 2016-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

7 – Clay Deeds (left) visiting his brother, Edward Deeds. The family made the trip every few weeks, often picnicking on the grounds of the hospital.

8 + 9 – Clay’s wife, Martaun Smith Deeds. Family identified Edward Deeds’s “Miss. Martin” (drawing number 64) as a portrait of his sister-in-law.

Sometime in the mid-1960s, Deeds decided to give the album he had made of his drawings to his mother. Arthritis had made it difficult for him to draw. We don’t know what she thought of her son’s handiwork. We know she loved him, was loyal to him, cared about him. However, when she became infirm and was moved to a nursing home, she gave the album to her other son, Clay, who placed it in his attic. Clay and his family eventually moved from their home in Springfield, and, during the transition, Clay mistakenly told the movers they could take whatever they wanted from the attic. The movers cleaned the space out, and, seeing no use for an album of strange drawings, they tossed it in a trash heap on the side of the road. The drawings shouldn’t have been found. But they were.

How will Edward Deeds’s work be viewed, classified, appreciated, now that it’s in the world? Deeds will be inevitably—has been already—referred to as an “outsider artist.” He will be discussed alongside other outsider artists such as James Castle, Henry Darger, Martín Ramírez, and Howard Finster.

The idea of “outsider art”—although certainly not the actual practice—has its modern origins with Jean Dubuffet, who called it art brut, writing:

By this we mean pieces of work executed by people untouched by artistic culture, in which therefore mimicry, contrary to what happens in intellectuals, plays little or no part, so that their authors draw everything (subjects, choice of materials employed, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from their own depths and not from clichés of classical art or art that is fashionable. Here we are witnessing an artistic operation that is completely pure, raw, reinvented in all its phases by its author, based solely on his own impulses.11

Many artists probably wouldn’t have been discovered or exhibited were it not for this classification that has allowed art critics and gallery owners to feel secure in buying and selling such nonclassic art. The famous outsider artist Martín Ramírez, who spent thirty-two years in California mental hospitals, left a legacy remarkably close to what Edward Deeds has left us, from nearly the same origins. Ramírez was institutionalized in 1931, just five years earlier than Deeds, first in California’s Stockton State Hospital and later in the DeWitt State Hospital. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl offers illuminating words in describing him, words that can just as well apply to James Edward Deeds:

Outsider art—lately euphemized as “self-taught,” a vapid label that inconveniently describes originality in general—comes from and goes nowhere in art history. (The outsider is a culture of one.) It defeats normal criticism’s tactics of context and comparison. It is barbaric. Can we skirt the imbroglio

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