Psychiatry in pictures

Roland Wilkie (b. 1939): Untitled and Sexual Pain (both ink and water-colour)

Roland Wilkie has been a voluntary in-patient at a psychiatric hospital in Quebec since 1995. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he refuses antipsychotic medication and expresses violent and paedophilic impulses. These are directed particularly towards blonde girls and are sublimated in the creation of disturbing and often brutal images. Although born into a Catholic family, he has become fascinated with Judaism and since 1989 has worn a self-designed military-style uniform that incorporates a crest depicting a menorah and Hebrew characters and has given himself the title of Lieutenant of the Beta 1 Unit of the Conciliatory Religious Army of Notre-Dame de La Salette. In some of his pictures he appears armed and with murderous intent alongside images of naked children. His pictures are made all the more disturbing by the awkward, childlike way in which they are made. Colin Rhodes, author of Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives has written: ‘There is nothing to be celebrated in these drawings, but they are important uncoverings of a most chilling potentiality of the human psyche’. Images reproduced by kind permission of Dr Christian Shriqui and courtesy of Henry Boxer Gallery (www.outsiderart.co.uk).