The self-taught artist Valton Tyler (1944-2017) spent most of his life living and working in Dallas, Texas, and its environs. He created a remarkable body of work — oil paintings on canvas, ink drawings on paper, and complex etchings — that remains very hard to classify according to existing style and genre labels. In 2017, brutjournal’s founder, Edward M. Gómez, and the cinematographer Chris Shields made the first-ever film about Tyler’s life and art, which the artist saw before he died. Now, this 42-minute-long film will reside permanently here, on the magazine’s website. It may be viewed in its entirety, free of charge. Watch it and get to know the bright, bizarre world of a techno-baroque visionary.

Plastic garbage has spilled dangerously out into the oceans and it’s overflowing in trash dumps. The artist Aurora Robson is a leading experimenter in the use of waste materials to make expressive works of art. We’ll be checking in with her and her fellow, new-art visionaries.

In the 1940s, in Switzerland, the French modern artist Jean Dubuffet did some of his most important research about art brut. Recently, in that country, a group of richly embroidered, mixed-media garments, paintings, drawings, and ceramics featuring ornate decorations was discovered in an old house by its new owner. Their maker, a reclusive woman, had lived there, alone, following the death of her father, a retired printer. Large printing presses were found in the basement. Coming: brutjournal’s exclusive, photo-filled report.

Some people like to hit the highway and head off to vacation getaways, and then there are our pals in a sunny part of the U.S.A. who routinely pack up their wagon, cameras at the ready, and take to the surprises-filled back roads in search of unusual art and architecture. Coming: exclusive, photo-filled excerpts from their travel journals.

The version of brutjournal you’re examining right now is what we’re calling a sample or “teaser” issue, containing examples of the kinds of news items and articles the magazine will bring you each month, starting with the publication of its first regular monthly issue on September 1, 2021. Looking ahead to that inaugural issue, we’ll be publishing exclusive excerpts from Daniel Wojcik’s forthcoming book, Artist as Astronaut: The Otherworldly Art of Ionel Talpazan (which will be issued later this year by Strange Attractor in the United Kingdom and distributed in the United States by The MIT Press). A specialist in folk art and mythology who teaches at the University of Oregon, Wojcik is a well-known authority on the life and work of Talpazan (1955-2015), a Romanian-born, self-taught artist who immigrated to the U.S. and lived a hardscrabble life in New York City, where he sold his paintings and drawings on the street. The subject of his art was also his lifelong obsession: unidentified flying objects. Talpazan lived and breathed UFOs. Wojcik’s article to come promises to take us away... September’s inaugural issue will also feature another exclusive — our report about a discovery, in Switzerland, of a group of unusual paintings, painted ceramics, and mixed-media garments in an old house that was purchased by a foreign businessman. (See the separate box here on THE BIG PAGE.) As interesting as his big find turned out to be, so did his unexpected adventures in lawyerland. That’s because, even though the house’s former owners had sold it to him along with everything in it, its buyer wisely sought to obtain full intellectual property rights governing the artworks. There is a lesson in this unwitting new art collector’s experience, and we’re going to explain what it is. There are more, more, more verses to sing in our September-is-coming song. About, for example, the exhibition of “ordinary” people’s art the cross-dressing British artist Grayson Perry has organized for an art center in Manchester; it’s linked to his popular “Grayson’s Art Club” TV program on the U.K.’s Channel 4, and our special correspondent in northern England is going to see it.