Black Sheep Gallery - Folk, Outsider and Self-taught Art

Welcome to our first newsletter of 2025. Our New Year's resolution was to stop watching the news and just enjoy art and more art, so we would like to shout out to some of our favorite sites. Not only is their magazine great but their Instagram site rawvisionmagazine is worth following. Adam Oestreich shares his love of outsider, self-taught and folk artists from around the world at folkartwork . The Artist Profile Archive is a platform featuring short documentaries of contemporary artists and folkartoutsiderart a great site with folk art, outsider art, visionary art and self taught art.

So, what do we have in the gallery this month? We thought we would start with a spicy little piece by Murray Gallant, who passed away in 2024. Murray was a sweet gentleman from New Waterford Cape Breton, and we enjoyed several visits with him and his wife Teresa. Murray's Cape Breton ladies and Walmart men are just plain funny, and very popular. Murray is also known for occasionally carving naughty work such as his naked weddings. The Park Bench is a little risque and awfully cute but I am personally a sucker for any carving with a dog in it.

Imelda George's Carousel will also lighten your day. Imelda attended the early folk art festivals in Nova Scotia. Also from Cape Breton, Imelda developed an allergy to wood dust and stopped carving in the early 2000s. Her work, which is becoming increasingly difficult to find, is very detailed and the interplay between the light and colour in her painting often creates a stained glass effect. This carousel manually spins under the canopy of houses. Imelda has playfully replaced the carousel horses with an assortment of things including a cow, a very fat fish and a rowboat.

We are also featuring a long necked seagull by Bradford Naugler. Bradford must have been thrilled when he found that neck in the load of winter wood he had cut for his studio wood stove. It is an early carving and has several cracks on its neck and back. We enjoyed looking at in the studio and considered restoration options but, as is usually the case, it looked so dam good with those age lines that we share it as we found it. Don't you love that neck?

If you are a Tom Rector fan one of his stickmen is a staple for your collection. Like Bradford, Tom and his son Stanley were always on the lookout for interesting branch formations to incorporate into their art. They made the stickmen in all shapes and sizes but I have always preferred the chunkier ones like this man in the red shirt.

We have another hooked mat by Truro, Nova Scotia artist Laura Kenney. This mat, measuring 16" by 27" was from her 2018 two person exhibition Whose Maud? with realist painter Steven Rhude at Acadia University Art Gallery. The show took a critical look at the commodification of Maud Lewis' life and paintings, and the rumour that Everett was always eager to be the one to accept payment for her work.

We feel a little negligent, living so close to the ocean, if we don't include some art that has been influenced by its bounty and beauty. The first is a simple flat fish or flounder. Probably the first fish people catch off the shore in Nova Scotia. Murray Eisnor has captured its simple beauty in this quaint rendition.

The small, hooked mat (14" by 20") by an unnamed artist, probably from a hooking guild on our North shore of Nova Scotia, depicts a colourful coastal fishing village, so common in Nova Scotia, with a lighthouse and dories and gulls flying overhead.

Maud Lewis has also captured our tranquil coastal communities in this original oil on greenboard painting. An earlier work, probably painted in the early 50s, this painting is a gem. Maud Lewis was known for her serial images of oxen, cats and sleighs in winter and her harbour scenes are not as common and each scene is unique. Maud has created a beautiful balance of oranges, browns and blues to capture the feel of the sea and of course there are seagulls swooping over the wharf waiting for pieces of the cleaned fish. Maud had an affinity for seagulls and Everett said in the 1976 film A World Without Shadows "the seagulls used to come around all the time, right down by the window. After she went, they never come at all. They knew she was gone, I suppose." Perhaps she was leaving her memory of them, for us to enjoy, in this painting.

Be safe everyone.

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