Charley Parker blogs about French "outsider artist" and painter Augustin Lesage (1876-1954).

After voices told him to paint at age 14, Lesage, Parker writes, "began with 'automatic drawing', a practice the Surrealists employed to produce art directly form the subconscious, but one also associated with communicating with the departed by spiritualists. He moved from there into painting, guided by the voices, and began to produce large scale canvasses in which he explored kalidoscopic images, repetitions of surface patterns and themes of spiritualism and symbolism."