Fanboy Art Collection

I had a mixed reaction to KAWS (aka Brian Donnelly) after seeing an exhibit of his work at the Brooklyn Museum but his fanboy outsider art collection hits all the right notes.  Basil Wolverton's caricature looked familiar, probably from Mad magazine which appealed to my eye as much as my teen funny bone.

 

"TV Calamity" Original Art by Basil Wolverton (ca 1960s)

For mostly prurient reasons, I enjoyed Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat in college.  It wasn't until Terry Zwigoff explored their weird creator in Crumb, a 1994 documentary, that I realized how much R.'s comix colored my view of the counter culture.  He often collaborated with Aline Kominsky, his wife, whom he drew below with a Mac and who was immortalized in Diary of a Teenage Girl, one of my favorite films of the last decade. 

Doesn't this sketch have an Edward Hopper vibe?

"Hotel Girl Study" by Jane Dickson (2016)

Donnelly clearly has a taste for strange, surreal and abstract images.

"In The Desert" by H.C. Westerman (1971)

"Math" by Nicole Eisenman (2017)

Untitled by Lee Lozano (1962)

Forty-eight untitled drawings by Helen Rae cover an entire wall, exuding a fractured magnetism.  Deaf and non-verbal, she found inspiration for many of them in Vogue fashion shoots.  Rae added her own Cubist-like twist, transforming them into something else entirely.  She exhibited her work, my favorite in the show, for the first time at age 76.

IMHO, Donnelly should establish his own museum or at least endow a wing at another institution to share his atypical taste with the world on a permanent basis.  

If you haven't seen The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, you're in for a real treat.  Benedict Cumberbatch does a smashing job portraying the artist who changed the way the world treats cats.

Untitled (1932)

"My Wallpaper" (1931)

Dogs peer out from a collage by Nicole Appel.

Dancers & Dogs (2019)

She also has a thing for Cuba.

"Cuba" (2018)