Albert Louden

Louden was born in 1943 in the seaside resort of Blackpool after his family had been evacuated from London's East End. At the end of the war they returned and shortly! afterwards his father left the young Albert and his mother. Louden left school without qualifications at fifteen and worked in a series of driving jobs. He only began to make art at the age 'Of nineteen, working compulsively and without thought of an audience other than himself. Yet his obsession was such that for twenty years he took: part-time work only to keep himself and buy materials, leaving him time to paint. For a time in the 'early 1970's he was involved in Marxist politics, but once again gave up activism when he felt it was interfering with his capacity to paint. Louden's work falls broadly into three categories on which he works more or less concurrently: . hallucinatory images of people, whose spatial positioning and individual body parts seem to be governed by some secret hieratic law; bold, simplified landscapes; and shimmering, intense, painterly abstractions (the latter known to only a very few people). Though stylistically quite different, all the work shares in common an almost' mystical feeling for the life force which beats in all things; that connectivity which the visionary perceives as dissolving and mutating form.

Albert Louden's work is represented in many museum worldwide including: The American Visionary Art Museum, and the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne.