JEAN DUBUFFET Mele Moments, 2016

Jean Dubuffet (1901 – 1985) was a French painter and sculptor born in Le Havre. His idealistic approach embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement Art Brut, to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture and the established art scene. He often experimented with mixing materials into his oil paint such as mud, sand, coal dust, pebbles, pieces of glass, string, straw, plaster, gravel, cement, and tar, allowing him to abandon the traditional method of painting with a brush in favor of a more physical and dynamic approach. Dubuffet felt that the simple life of the everyday human being contained more art and poetry than did academic art.