American Illustration 31 Winners

Adolf's Aberration

One from a series for "Adolf's Aberration," August 12, 2011, a visual biography about a 19th-century Swiss outsider artist Adolf Woelfli, who grew up an orphan, moved from one alcoholic foster family to the next, worked as a day laborer, suffered a broken heart, was arrested for immoral behavior, diagnosed with schizophrenia and interned in a psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life where he discovered his love for drawing, never left his cell so that he could draw night and day, and produced 25,000 works of art, all telling the wondrous and exciting tales of an imagined parallel life, lived by an imagined alter ego who travels the world, meets beautiful queens and becomes rich and famous.

Adolf's Aberration

One from a series for "Adolf's Aberration," August 12, 2011, a visual biography about a 19th-century Swiss outsider artist Adolf Woelfli, who grew up an orphan, moved from one alcoholic foster family to the next, worked as a day laborer, suffered a broken heart, was arrested for immoral behavior, diagnosed with schizophrenia and interned in a psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life where he discovered his love for drawing, never left his cell so that he could draw night and day, and produced 25,000 works of art, all telling the wondrous and exciting tales of an imagined parallel life, lived by an imagined alter ego who travels the world, meets beautiful queens and becomes rich and famous.