Purvis Young was born in 1943 in Florida and has lived
there all his life. He started to paint when he was in
prison for armed robbery. Purvis has created a major
sensation in the folk art world. He used to work under a big
highway underpass where he created paintings depicting his
life as a homeless black man. The paintings are filled with
images of people being drugged ... raw and primitive
depiction's. In his earliest work, he would create five to
six different paintings on a single piece of large plywood.
(People have been known to acquire these and then cut them
up into a series of individual paintings rather than leave
them the way they were created.) Purvis's work is in the
permanent collection of the Fayette Art Museum, the Rockford
Art Museum and the Kentucky Folk Art Center.
