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Eddie Arning
1898–1993
Eddie Arning was born in a Texas farming community to strict Lutheran parents. He left school after six years to work on the family farm. Symptoms of mental illness appeared when he was in his mid-twenties, and bouts of anger and depression culminated in an attack on his mother. At age thirty, he was convicted of insanity in a jury trial and sentenced to a mental institution. In 1964, at age sixty-six, his symptoms had abated and he was transferred to a nursing home, where the ten-year period of his artistic life began. At the home, Arning was given coloring books by a teacher who, seeing his talent, encouraged him to make drawings on his own.

Arning's drawings, done on paper in crayon and pastel, are inspired by magazine illustrations. A comparison of Arning's drawings with the original sources reveals his manipulation of the design elements, and accentuates the particularity of his approach.

Arning's work has been included in numerous books including Hemphill and Weissman's -20th Century American Folk Art and Artists, and Folk Painters of America, by Robert Bishop. In 1985, he had a year-long exhibit at the Abby Alrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg Virginia, and his drawings are represented in the collections of more than a dozen museums.

In 1973, Arning was asked to leave his nursing home for non-cooperation and went home to live with his widowed sister. Within a year he had stopped drawing altogether.
[price range: $4,000-7,000]