Primitive Paintings By Artist Robert Bannister
Item History & Price
Robert Bannister was born in 1911 in Urbana Illinois (twin city to Champaign). He died in 1996. Bannister was stricken with tuberculosis of the hip when he was six years old and lived in the Champaign County Nursing home until the mid-1950s. It was during his stay at the nursing home that Bannister was introduced to painting. The inspiration for Bannister’s work came from magazines and books including volumes on Psycho-Cybernetics, Cosmic Consciou...sness, human anatomy, and popular science and science fiction. Bannister became familiar with Maxwell Matz’s 1960 book, Psycho Cybernetics, which delved into his theories about visualization and self-affirmation.Humor played an important role in Bannister’s work. He liked the trickster character in folklore. Bannister’s works are filled with a visual shorthand of whimsy and horror. He called his work “abstruse” and said he used color in his work to describe emotions. Bannister’s most creative period occurred in a 10-15 year span beginning in the mid-1950s and ending around the time I met him in 1975. In 1990, C-U artist, Glenn Davies, took Chicago artist and curator Don Baum to visit Bannister. Baum’s interest in Mr. Bannister led to an exhibit he was curating at the Arts Club of Chicago. The show, titled “Visions: Expressions Beyond the Mainstream from Chicago Collections, ” presented Robert Bannister’s work with such outsider artists as Reverend Howard Finster, Henry Darger, William Edmondson, Bill Traylor, and Sister Gertrude Morgan. Mr. Bannister seemed pleased if not perplexed at being given such attention and took it all in stride.In 2006, Davies organized the exhibition Cosmic Consciousness:The Works of Robert Bannister, for the Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavillion.
