Untitled (Dandelion on Orange)

Eddie Arning

ca. 1968-70. Crayon and Craypas on paper. 12" x 19.5"

Eddie Arning (1898-1993) grew up on his father's farm in Germania, Texas. His violent outbursts eventually resulted in him being institutionalized. In 1964, a teacher employed by the hospital offered him wax crayons, paper, and coloring books. Their flat restricted forms seem to have shaped his visual sensibility, but his ability to master more complex arrangements of figures, colors, and patterns grew rapidly-as did his repertoire of materials and images. He eventually began to work in oil pastels, which lent a soft, glowing, almost floating quality to his shapes.

Arning's work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum in New York, among others.

The Ricco/Maresca Gallery champions and showcases the art of self-taught masters working outside the continuum of art history. The gallery specializes in Outsider, Self-Taught, Contemporary, and historically significant American Folk art in various media.

Over a period of more than 35 years, Ricco/Maresca has helped blur the lines that have habitually separated conventional art-historical categories and "marginal" art. The gallery has carried out this mission through a pioneering program that emphasizes crossover between vernacular and mainstream traditions, the management of key estates (William Hawkins and Martín Ramírez among them), and seminal books produced with publishing partners such as Alfred A. Knopf, Little Brown and Company, and Pomegranate Press.