Thomas Pringle

According to Thomas Pringle (b. 1941), he got his first job at 1½ years old picking fruit from trees. A few months later he was paid for collecting rattlesnakes in a sack, and a year after that he became the youngest fighter pilot in WWII. Once, he threw a line off Pier 39 and caught a shark using bits of squid as bait. To top it all off, at the age of nine he heroically, and safely, crash-landed an airplane into a large sandbox at a children’s playground. No children were harmed. Life is how you tell it, art is what you call it, and Pringle states, “What I see is what I draw.” But how can you trust a fabled raconteur like Thomas Pringle? You look at his work, and listen to what it tells you. His line is true; it is honest. The erasures of its early attempts are in plain sight. He’ll leave the three tries at an eye’s shape stacked above and below the best one. The multiple versions of a bent elbow move faintly beneath the solidified final choice.

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Artbrut

Die Art Brut Akademie Austria sieht ihre Kernaufgabe darin, der einmaligen Kunstrichtung Art Brut jenen Platz innerhalb der österreichischen Kunstlandschaft zu erarbeiten, der ihr im Kontext der gegenwärtigen internationalen Entwicklungen in diesem Feld zusteht.