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"The Hills of Old Wyoming in the Valley of the Moon near Casper Wyoming"

c. 1966
Joseph Yoakum (American, 1890–1972)
Yoakum was born in Missouri and traveled extensively in his youth, working a variety of jobs---including several with circuses---until he was about forty and settled in Chicago. In his seventies he began to produce the ball-point pen and colored pencil drawings for which he is known, in which the world is flattened out almost in the manner of a Persian miniature, creating visionary scenes of muted power and causing rocks and rivers, trees and clouds to conform to a stylized but organic system of patterning. No one knows whether his carefully labeled drawings were done from memory, reproductions, or imagination.

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