b.1951 · Te Aroha, New Zealand
She stopped speaking as a small child and let the drawing do all of it. Fifty years later the world finally listened.
The life
King was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand, one of twelve children, and stopped speaking entirely around the age of four. She drew constantly from infancy, on any paper in the house, and her family carefully kept the work for decades. After a long pause from the 1990s she began drawing again in 2008, and her rediscovery, championed by her family and by curators abroad, made her an international name in her sixties, with acclaimed shows in New York and beyond.
The work
Virtuosic graphite and crayon compositions in which comic characters, Donald Duck above all, are bent, stretched, compressed and multiplied into abstractions that anticipate all sorts of contemporary drawing. The line is astonishingly controlled, the space packed and musical. She remains a living, working artist.
Why we love them
The purest case for drawing as a first language rather than a substitute for one.
Go deeper
- Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
- The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.
Kindred spirits
Dan Millerb.1961, Oakland, California, USA
Joseph Yoakumc.1890-1972, Chicago, USA
← All 46 artists in the field guide
Untrained and unstoppable, like them? Like us?