Visionary artist Leon Kennedy discusses painter John Biggers

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OutsiderArtwork
September 10, 2007

By seventeen, spiritual visionary artist Leon Kennedy (b. 1945, Houston, Texas), already identified himself a community portrait artist. He happened upon a mural by John Biggers, and felt such a...

By seventeen, spiritual visionary artist Leon Kennedy (b. 1945, Houston, Texas), already identified himself a community portrait artist. He happened upon a mural by John Biggers, and felt such affinity he introduced himself to Biggers at Texas Southern University. John Biggers was deeply impressed with Leon's "powerful great drawing" and brought Leon into his class studio, to audit for over a year. Never officially enrolled, Leon met with Biggers twice a week, bringing 10-20 new drawings for one-on-one critique. Biggers often used Leon's work for class discussion, affirming Leon's path. Leon washed dishes during this time. This was a few years after Biggers won his UNESCO fellowship and his West Africa journey, and after the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Dallas Museum of Art had awarded purchase prizes to Biggers, but did not allow him to attend the reception because segregationist policies.

Leon moved to California, but years later when Leon visited Biggers and was invited to speak at the school, Biggers introduced Leon as a "special self-taught artist, whose work is inspired and powerful."
Leon still has his copy of Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa (1962).

Though Leon is considered self-taught, he did have this significant early influence by a great African American Master, who advocated painting from real life the condition of humanity. Biggers loved Leon's drawings and brut truth; and while Biggers was a monalithic art figure, and his philosophy can be discerned in Leon's work; Biggers was so impressed and delighted with "his student," the influences went both ways.

While Leon is primarily known for his ecstatic visions of heaven and his portraits, and is generally considered a gifted brut artist, he is rooted in a tradition of conscious social witnessing. This is why much of Leon's work defies the formal expectations some have of outsider work by gifted artists. Leon, who has shown at Creative Growth where Judith Scott (1943-2005) worked, defies easy categorizing. He defines raw, a regionalist and universalist; a spiritualist visionary and a painter of life. At times minimal, abstract, complex; landscapes, portraits, memory paintings, visions, dreams, parables. Leon Kennedy is not a typically naive folk painter, he is simply one of the world's great artists, which is why the Smithsonian hand-picked his work for purchase acquisition from the Rosnaks.

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Texas Southern University John Biggers art American black Smithsonian burningbook latham

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