Was Uncle Donald a Hidden Genius - or Just Mad? Sold a Single One. Showed Them to a Famously Irascible Art Critic?
Mail on Sunday › August 21, 2011
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Summary
Sometimes, at silly moments in my life, I think I hear my late Uncle Don laughing.At me? With me? You never quite knew with Don. Nor were you ever sure whether 'funny' was the word he would have chosen, artist of life's oddity that he was.
Donald Young painted the ridiculous, the lovable and the grotesque. He did so as an outsider. He painted with a kind of affection, a kind of scorn - and a hint of hysteria. Almost nobody saw his paintings. Now, two decades after his death, I've found him an audience. It fulfils a promise I made his wife on her deathbed.See the full content of this document
Extract
Was Uncle Donald a Hidden Genius - or Just Mad? Sold a Single One. Showed Them to a Famously Irascible Art Critic?
I knew Don because he married my aunt, my father's only sister, Joyce. Their marriage became for them a kind of castle, fortified against the world outside.
It is with their wedding in 1947 that my family's part of the story starts, a story in whose latest chapter I found myself this summer driving out of Wimbledon in a hired car with a man I hardly knew: the writer and art critic Brian Sewell.Brian and I were headed for Warwick, where in a basement in the dark was stacked Don's entire li...See the full content of this document
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