Authors on Art: Becoming Anonymous – BURNAWAY

At the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore is a carving that’s part of the museum’s permanent collection. Titled Recovery,
the work is a life-size self-portrait made from a single apple tree
trunk, carved by a British mental patient with “a distinctive concave
chest from years of tuberculosis” and a tragic but interesting history:

His doctor remembered that he took no interest in making
art until he encountered a fallen apple tree during a walk on the
hospital grounds and asked for help in dragging it indoors and getting
simple carving tools…For a month, the patient whittled the wood down to
this figure. The artist, in his thirties, committed suicide about two
years after leaving the hospital. This applewood figure is his only
known work of art.