Frank Calloway draws pen, marker, and crayon murals on butcher block paper, some more than 30 feet long. Calloway is 112 years old and has lived in mental hospitals since 1952. His work will be featured in an exhibit at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum. The Associated Press profiled Calloway and created a wonderful slideshow with Calloway speaking. From the AP:
Calloway views art as his job and sits at a table by a window drawing for seven to nine hours a day, usually wearing blue denim overalls and a crisp dress shirt, said Nedra Moncrief-Craig, director of Alice M. Kidd Nursing Facility, a state home where Calloway lives…
(America Visionary Art Museum director Rebecca) Hoffberger called Calloway brilliant and described looking through notebooks full of numbers he keeps and noticing that there was a definite logical pattern to the strings of figures. There is "an instinctive attraction to math that is so inherent in his work," she said.
Rows of numbers line the edges of some of his artwork, and he sometimes stops in the middle of conversations to methodically recite multiplication tables.
Calloway is content being quietly absorbed in his work, but he also enjoys talking if people ask questions, Moncrief-Craig said. He listens intently and responds at length in a deep, gravelly voice as he rocks gently back and forth, often punctuating the end of a story with a soft chuckle and a huge smile that lights up a broad face that has very few wrinkles.
Frank Calloway profile (CNN)
