Word: self-taught
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...great night for the old conductor, who had almost singlehanded built a crew of amateur parlor-fiddlers into a professional orchestra. Forty years earlier he had gone to work as a Caracas cigarmaker because "there wasn't enough music to make a living at it." Later, as a self-taught harmony teacher, then as director of Caracas' School of Music, he plugged for a place for the arts in the national life. The revolution of 1945 gave him his big break. Elected to the Constituent Assembly as a supporter of President Rómulo Betancourt's Acci...
...Camille Bombois is one of Paris' best-selling "primitive" (self-taught) painters. He lives with his wife and their canary in a cosily cluttered little house on the Rue Emile-Desvaux, painting steadily and tidily far into the night, by the light of a big electric lamp. Sometimes he takes a day off to explore the countryside around Paris, armed with a camera. Most of his pictures, including the nudes, are painted from photographs. "I can't be bothered with models," says Bombois, "and anyway my studio is too small for that kind of business...
...pass the time away, Anna Mary Robertson Moses has painted nearly 700 pictures in the last seven years. Now, at 86, "Grandma" Moses is the best-known self-taught (or "primitive") painter in the U.S., and her gay little landscapes (mostly of her upstate New York farm in the Hoosik Valley) fetch an average $1,000. "I will say," she admitted, "that I have did remarkable for one of my years and experience...
Blakelock, self-taught, had spent most of his life fanatically painting bigger, better landscapes, and trying to support his family in the slum-infested fringes of Manhattan by peddling the pictures to framers, Third Avenue junk dealers, and auction houses for a few dollars apiece. Intermittently, his work was exhibited at the National Academy; but conventional critics of the 1870s and '80s did not like the misty, moody landscapes-empty of human life-which Blakelock did best. Storytelling in painting was the fashion...
Born & bred in Boston, the self-taught son of a hardware dealer, Homer sold his first drawings to Harper's Weekly at 21, went on to become a crack pictorial reporter of the Civil War and to record postwar life in the U.S. from New England farmyards to fashionable Long Branch, N. J. But he found his best subjects, and painted best, in solitude...