Comments on: A Russian outsider artist and his guns

A Russian outsider artist and his guns

hydrophonic — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:27:01 -0800

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.

By: jcruelty

jcruelty — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:34:20 -0800

can i just say that "mental.ru" is a great domain name!

By: krinklyfig

krinklyfig — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:43:10 -0800

Can't get through ...

By: krinklyfig

krinklyfig — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:47:57 -0800

... to mental.ru, that is.

By: Artw

Artw — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:00:24 -0800

Given the other .ru sites I've seen about guns I'd love to see a mental one.

By: hydrophonic

hydrophonic — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:34:12 -0800

Too much traffic for mental.ru, I guess. Here's some Google cached pages: 1 2 3 4

By: pax digita

pax digita — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:31:38 -0800

Russian...guns...confined... Well, Freedom got an AK.

By: Ynoxas

Ynoxas — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:15:42 -0800

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.

By: Joseph Gurl

Joseph Gurl — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:17:14 -0800

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.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:19:07 -0800

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.)

By: JJ86

JJ86 — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:03:53 -0800

Not all of the pics are of himself. Stalin seems to be a favorite subject too.

By: 3.2.3

3.2.3 — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:34:23 -0800

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.

By: dansdata

dansdata — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:34:23 -0800

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.)