Marc Lamy

b. 1939 · Lyon, France

The son of Lyon stained-glass makers, he heard voices from the depths of time and answered with an architect’s pen: one drawing a day, finished by nightfall.

The life

Lamy was born in Lyon in 1939 to parents who ran a stained-glass workshop, and as a boy watched them repair the bombed-out windows of French churches after the war. Educated by Jesuits and at the School of Fine Arts, he walked away from the art establishment and worked instead as a hospital orderly, a restaurateur and a caretaker at a juvenile detention centre. After his divorce and the forced sale of his restaurant in 1979 his health broke down, and in 1988 he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Lyon with chronic insomnia and auditory hallucinations. There he began to draw, prolifically, guided by what he described as supernatural voices coming to him from the depths of time.

The work

Faces surfacing out of dense geometric webs of line, drawn in Indian ink with a Rapidograph, the architect’s pen, under a strict self-imposed rule that every work be completed within a single day. The repetition becomes hypnotic, a meditation with a nib. His work is held by the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the LaM in Lille and the Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent.

Why we love them

One pen, one day, one face pulled out of the static at a time. A discipline as strange and strict as any monastery’s.

Go deeper

• Marc Lamy at the Outsider Art Fair
• Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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