A Russian outsider artist and his guns
June 12, 2007 2:27 PM   Subscribe

Alexander Pavlovich Lobanov was a Russian deaf-mute confined to psychiatric institutions for over 50 years. He liked to draw pictures of himself with guns. Lots of guns.
posted by hydrophonic (12 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
can i just say that "mental.ru" is a great domain name!
posted by jcruelty at 2:34 PM on June 12, 2007


Can't get through ...
posted by krinklyfig at 2:43 PM on June 12, 2007


... to mental.ru, that is.
posted by krinklyfig at 2:47 PM on June 12, 2007


Given the other .ru sites I've seen about guns I'd love to see a mental one.
posted by Artw at 3:00 PM on June 12, 2007


Too much traffic for mental.ru, I guess. Here's some Google cached pages: 1 2 3 4
posted by hydrophonic at 3:34 PM on June 12, 2007


Russian...guns...confined...

Well, Freedom got an AK.
posted by pax digita at 4:31 PM on June 12, 2007


Ok, i'm not sure what to make of this, but the last link was not responding, so I closed it, and I got a cascade of fresh opening links to the same dead page.

I force-closed about 40 of them before I just hit logoff.

Reminded me of the old porn spam windows you used to get back about 2002.

So, maybe it was a random error, but beware Vista users. Note I had popup blocker turned on.
posted by Ynoxas at 5:15 PM on June 12, 2007


Lobanov is great- he's been catching on as an outsider art-world darling the last decade or so, and his work is pretty widely known now.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:17 PM on June 12, 2007


Fascinating. I like this one quite a lot. (Like a number of his others, it's captioned охотник стреляет хорошо [okhotnik strelyaet khorosho] 'the hunter shoots well.')

I see he was from Mologa, a northern Russian town that was flooded for the Rybinsk Reservoir in 1939; there's a nice site commemorating the town and its history, with a page of photographs of the way it used to be. (I posted about it last year—I'm a sucker for sunken cities.)
posted by languagehat at 5:19 PM on June 12, 2007


Not all of the pics are of himself. Stalin seems to be a favorite subject too.
posted by JJ86 at 7:03 PM on June 12, 2007


A few with Lenin. And then this tripped out oddity:

http://www.mental.ru/Forall/gallery/photo.php?ID=2100&SECTION_ID=188&PARENT=175

The "himself" photograph is fantastic.
posted by 3.2.3 at 7:34 PM on June 12, 2007


You're on notice, game designers: If you include a bolt-action double rifle in your new shooter, you now must call it the "Lobanov".

(Such weapons are actually very rare and peculiar, far less common than the standard old-fashioned "elephant gun" double rifle.)
posted by dansdata at 8:34 PM on June 12, 2007


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