Marc Lamy

Born 1939 in Lyon, France

Born in 1939, Marc Lamy was educated in a Jesuit monastery and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts before stepping back from the art world. His parents were makers of stained glass and as a boy Lamy spent time watching them repair the bombed-out windows of French churches damaged in the Second World War. Later, he held several jobs including that of a hospital orderly, a restaurateur, and then as a worker in a home for juvenile delinquents.

In 1988 Lamy began to struggle with insomnia and auditory hallucinations and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Inspired, he says, by supernatural voices seemingly coming to him from the depths of time, he began to draw “like a knight errant” and has produced a significant body of work using only a standard, black-ink, mechanical drawing pen. He finds hypnotic virtue in drawing, with the repetitive to-and-fro movements of ink lines as they grow on the paper. Lamy’s compositions are geometrically elaborate, in which faces pop out of his meticulously drafted patterns. The finely drawn lines may crisscross on top of each other or be spaced more liberally to create billowing shapes.

A solo exhibit for Lamy took place at the Collection de l’art brut in Lausanne in 1994 and 50 of his drawings were displayed in the American Visionary Art Museum’s Treasures of the Soul exhibit in 2001. His work is in the permanent collections of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent, Belgium and the Musée de l’Art Brut in Paris.