TANCRED CALHOUN’S STRANGE ART: DISCOVERED IN A FLEA MARKET, HIS BURNED-WOOD PICTURES MIX EROS AND TECHNICAL EXPERIMENTATION

brutjournal CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER AND PAINTER STEVEN HIRSCH STUMBLES UPON A DECEASED, SELF-TAUGHT ART-MAKER’S TREASURES

Published on February 10, 2026

by Edward M. Gómez, with Steven Hirsch

NEW YORK — The annals of art brut and outsider art are filled with stories of the discoveries of unusual bodies of work — paintings, drawings, sculptures, carvings, and, often, other hard-to-label, peculiar creations — made by deceased self-taught artists about whose lives little was known at the time they were found.

Two of the pictures made by the late, self-taught artist Tancred Calhoun (1947-2020) by burning lines with a hot pen into the surfaces of slabs of wood and then painting over them with acrylic paint. (Dates of these artworks unknown.) Photo by Steven Hirsch

Likewise, even many years after such big finds, many key questions about the trajectories of such art-makers’ lives as well as about their motivations for producing their strange creations may linger until researchers, if they’re lucky, happen to encounter sources that can provide solid answers to their queries.

Since its launch in 2021, brutjournal has introduced the works of numerous, hitherto unknown self-taught art-makers whose works can properly be placed in the art brut or outsider art categories, including, for example, an anonymous Swiss maker of drawings and mixed-media garments known as “E.B.,” who was born in 1948 and died in 2011, and Shirley Cohen (1922-2019), a creator of futuristic paintings and site-specific murals who worked at her home in the New York City borough of Queens.