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Joseph E. Yoakum

Based on Chicago’s South Side, Joseph E. Yoakum began drawing intensely in his seventies after feeling divinely called to create. During his brief but prolific career, Yoakum produced more than 2,000 drawings, often made using commonplace materials like his trademark ballpoint pen. Landscape was a favorite subject for Yoakum, who travelled extensively as a young boy in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the Ringling Brothers Circus, and later as a soldier in World War I. Characterized by striated lines and undulating shapes, his landscapes regularly drew on a combination of personal experience and imagination. This highly stylized representation of the Caucasus Mountains exemplifies Yoakum’s use of line, color, and sinuous pattern to create an animated vision of natural formations like mountains, forests, and waves. Yoakum developed this playful and idiosyncratic style to convey the emotions and memories evoked by the landscape. As the artist famously explained, “The drawings are unfolded to me, a spiritual unfoldment.”

— Vicky Chen