Eugene Andolsek

1921-2008 · Adrian, West Virginia, USA

Almost every evening for fifty years, a railroad stenographer sat at his kitchen table with compass, ruler and bottles of ink, drawing kaleidoscopic mandalas that nobody ever saw.

The life

Andolsek was born in Adrian, West Virginia in 1921 and spent his working life as a stenographer for the Rock Island Railroad, a job whose pressure he found crushing. From the early 1950s he drew at his kitchen table nearly every night, using the practice to steady his anxiety while he cared for his mother. He never called it art and never hung a single sheet. Failing eyesight stopped the drawing in 2003, and a caregiver at his retirement home showed the work to the Andy Warhol Museum, which led to the American Folk Art Museum’s 2005 exhibition Obsessive Drawing. He died in 2008.

The work

Ink on graph paper: compass-and-straightedge geometry flooded with brilliant coloured inks, layer over layer, with the radiance of stained glass and the intricacy of oriental carpets. He produced several thousand drawings across five decades. His work is held by the American Folk Art Museum in New York and Intuit in Chicago.

Why we love them

Art as private medicine, taken nightly for fifty years and perfected in secret. The world only found out when the treatment ended.

Go deeper

• Eugene Andolsek at the Outsider Art Fair
• Eugene Andolsek on Wikipedia
• 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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