St. Vinzentz=Münster, in Bern 1916

Adolf Wölfli made this drawing of St. Vinzentz=Münster in Bern, using colored pencil and graphite. It’s a tightly packed, vibratory image – look at how the yellow ochre and red ripple across the turret of the cathedral. I can imagine Wölfli hunched over this drawing, carefully building the scene with lines that seem to never end. The boundaries between the elements almost dissolve, as if everything is in conversation. I see towers, faces, numbers, and notes dancing together on the page. Did you notice the faces staring out at us, from all directions? Their expressions seem to say, “We see you too, looking at us!” And then there's the writing, weaving itself around everything, as if it's all part of one, huge language. Wölfli wasn’t formally trained and lived most of his adult life in a psychiatric clinic, but he produced an enormous body of work. Isn’t it amazing how artists, especially those who are self-taught, create their own languages and rules? To me, this is a reminder that art invites us to interpret it in our own way and to see the world through another’s eyes.