Artist’s Bio
“ All I knew was that there’s something really powerful and profound going on here. But the first thing that struck me was the hopefulness of the work. “
At the time that the movie was filmed, hopefulness for Purvis Young was in short supply. Ironically, just as international fame was finally coming his way, he was on the losing end of ten year battle with diabetes.
The artist, who recently turned sixty four, was surviving thanks to dyalisis treatments three times a week. Despite the fatigue induced by the treatments Purvis Young kept on painting. Now he has just been given a new lease on life, via a kidney transplant. Still convalescing from his operation, he looks forward to many more productive years devoted to his art.
“ Everyday, “ Young confided to his exclusive New York dealer, Daniel Aubry, “ I prays to be great….”
“ I expect he’ll be painting into his eighties and nineties like Picasso and Matisse, “ says Aubry, “ just getting better all the time. “
Young’s greatness is increasingly being acknowledged by a once skeptical art world.
In November 2006 he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Boca Raton Museum.
In January 2007 he was the Director’s Choice artist at the most recent edition of Art Miami, and a monumental archway of his work greeted visitors to the Miami Convention center.
The artist has lived all of his life in Overtown, Miami’s black ghetto. For the past thirty five years he’s been painting unceasingly in a series of abandoned, rat infested warehouses.
The once prosperous black community in which Purvis was born and grew up was at the time billed as the “Harlem of the South” . It was largely destroyed by the building of Highway I-95 and is now mostly populated by crack-heads, their dealers, prostitutes and pimps.
Adjoining the compound where Young lives with his common law wife is an alley called “ Bucket of Blood“ with the highest incidence of murder in the greater Miami area. Interestingly though, nobody bothers Purvis, the local
Icon. Everyone respectfully calls him “Mr. Young“ . In a community
virtually without hope he is the singular example of someone who “broke out“.
Even though Purvis Young’s work is in over fifty museums including the Smithsonian and the Corcoran, and innumerable collections such as the Rubell Family Collection, Purvis has never given a thought to leaving Overtown.
“I paint what I sees…I paint the problems of the world.“ says Young simply, and in public he wears dark glasses to “hide his tears” at the injustice and sadness he witnesses every day.
Because he could never afford canvas, Purvis paints on every surface available to him – discarded plywood and cardboard, refrigerator doors, table tops, scraps of fabric and metal trays, all often brought to him by scavengers in his neighborhood. Purvis Young has been creatively
“ recycling “ long before it was either fashionable or profitable.
Even though Young has until now been confined to a ghetto of another sort- that of “Outsider Art “ – his highly expressionistic work can best be described as “magic realism“.
His paintings are populated with angels which watch over turbulent cityscapes; faces reminiscent of an imagined Zulu past life, and symbols of freedom and escape – wild horses, trucks, and the flimsy craft that the boat people from Haiti use to journey to these shores, plowing through shark infested waters.
“I look at the wildlife – “ says Young, referring to the National Geographic channel, which he watches on T.V. while painting, in alternation with the History channel.
“ I see the Monarch butterfly go from here to Mexico and the wild geese go from here to South America. I look at stuff like that and I say that’s the way I want to be, you know. I want to be free.”
Three years in prison will do that to a man, which is the time that Purvis spent in jail for breaking and entering when he was in his late teens.
“When I was in my cell one night, “ Purvis remembers,” I woke up and the angels came to me and I told ‘em, you know, hey man this is not my life – and they said they were gonna make a way for me, you know…”
That way was Art. If any man can bear witness to the value of the Public Library system that man is Purvis Young.
“He’s like a kind of Rocky figure, “ says Barbara Young, Miami Art Reference Librarian. “ because he’s a person that’s had a lot of adversity in his life and he hasn’t had a lot of education or a lot of advantages, but he’s educated himself,” .
It’s in the Overtown Library – which he would one day adorn with his own murals – that he discovered Rembrandt and Van Gogh, two of his heroes. Purvis’ early drawings gradually reveal a growing mastery. Old books that the library was discarding became his sketch pads.
These rare examples of the artist’s thought process are now highly prized by Purvis Young collectors, who are a legion. They’d need to be because Young’s lifetime outpouring of work is nothing short of astounding. Asking Purvis to limit his output would be like trying to cap a live volcano and its outpourings of molten lava.
“He can’t stop painting,” says friend Branca Joldas. “He needs to paint 10 hours, 15 hours a day, whatever it takes. And he’s been doing that for forty years.”
Purvis Young’s appeal is proving to be universal.
“People know he’s the real thing,“ says Miami collector Cristina Santeiro.
“He’s painting from the heart…” is how Tony, an Overtown neighbor, puts it. “ He’s trying to show people that we need to make a change..”.
Of his own work Purvis Young has this to say: “I want people to know that I wish there would be peace in the world, and I will paint the way I paint until there is, and then one day maybe I could just hang up my brush and not paint no more.”