Louis Wain - I Was Told the World Went Round
The drawing at left is by Louis Wain, whose fascinating story can be read here. One-hundred years on and there's still no consensus about the man and his mind, but his work - be it the charming anthropomorphized early felines or the later, obsessively patterned visions - remains brilliant and utterly unique.
This piece is possibly my favorite of all his images. There's just something unsettling and melancholy about it. Were the cat a person instead, the apprehensive mood would remain.
This is a poem Wain apparently wrote on the reverse of one of his images, and it's one of my favorite pieces of writing ever. I generally find the writing of the insane to be unreadable - quite the opposite of their often compelling image-making. I'm not suggestinig Wain was ever actually insane, or that he was insane when he authored this, but it does nudge up against the sort of madness his pictures exhude. When I think I'm losing my mind (quite frequently) I re-read this, and while it offers no solace (or even any sort of sense) it does something for me.