Description: This house paint on plywood painting displays the theme of city life as Purvis shows in the man amongst buildings, vehicles and many other walking figures. A variety of bright colors gives this piece life. Signed on top right. Batten strips top and bottom.


History: Purvis Young 1943 - 2010. Purvis Young was born in Liberty City, a neighborhood of Miami, Florida, on February 2, 1943. As a young boy his uncle introduced him to drawing, but Young lost interest quickly. He never attended high school. As a teenager Young served three years (1961–64) in prison at North Florida's Raiford State Penitentiary for breaking and entering. While in prison he would regain his interest in art and began drawing and studying art books. When released, he began to produce thousands of small drawings, which he kept in shopping carts and later glued into discarded books and magazines that he found on the streets. He proceeded to move into the Overtown neighborhood of Miami. Young found himself attracted to a vacant alley called Goodbread Alley, which was named after the Jamaican bakeries that once occupied the street; he would start living there in 1971. The work of the urban black vernacular artist, Purvis Young, has roots in the dreamy fields of high art subject matter-evoking Picasso in its riders, its elegant horses, its nudes. At the same time it is filled with the energy and syncretism of the world's vanguard-American urban Black culture. It is to "outsider art" what be bop is to the blues. The subject matter rides on a thick layer of color, attention, choice, free-swinging composition that refers to a thousand years of composition before it. Young's choices of materials-the discarded boards he uses to paint on and to "frame" works; the fragments of text, the use of books to mount the works-are not made by happenstance, though early on they may have been the fruit of necessity. Now these are elements of meaning. Now they insist on the presence of the street, full of stuff, humanity, words, scraps, full of the exchanges that create the most exciting cultural milieu in the world, creative, tragic, excessive, beautiful, wasteful.

Provenance: N/A


Dimensions: Weight (Pounds & Ounces) = 4.5 | Height(in) = 37 | Width(in) = 29 | Depth(in) = 1

Size of Artwork(in): 37 x 29 x .75"


Artist Name: Purvis Young


Medium: Plywood, various paints.


Circa: Circa 1990

Good condition.