Ramona Maps: Primitive Painter

Gifted Children Records are serving up some outsider art for us lucky folks.
You’re Not Here: Selected Works from Ramona Maps comes out on Dec. 1st.

Years back, we briefly met a curious woman who calls herself “Ramona Maps” while passing through a little town called Jerome in Arizona. Jerome was once a largely populated mining town, but now sits as an ominous shell of what once was, populated by “the last great weirdos” (as one local put it), a small lot of artists (many of which, transplants), and just-passing-through tourists. We know it as one of the great ghost town stops in the United States. Another impressive title? “Meth-head central.”

We exchanged addresses with Ramona Maps in 2003 and due to the absence of a computer or Internet access in her life, have since been writing (by post) back and forth for the past five years.
Paintings, illustrations, mixed mediums, collages, recordings, diary entries, short stories, you name it, filled these envelopes – In essence, we received (or Xerox copies of) her "entire life's work," as she now puts it, some works dating as far back as 1979: Her beginnings as an artist at the age of 6, using just water color and pencil.

After careful planning, intense difficulty communicating, long waits for “Ramona mail,” and connecting Ramona Maps to a home in Prescott (AZ) with Internet service, we are elated to announce we will be releasing her work to the public as a booklet series, each booklet accompanied by a CD-R of Ramona Maps’ self-recordings, which by default, fall into the experimental category. The Ramona Maps Series will be divided by medium and/or era in which it belongs to.

Our first in the series, You’re Not Here: Selected Works collects her work from 1979-1987, all of which includes her “primitive” watercolor works. Dealing with religious imagery and subjects of “soft” abuse, these works are not so much primitive, but rather advanced for a child creating such between the ages of six and fourteen.

In addition to her artwork, the pages are filled with scans of original diary entries from these years, as well as more recent narratives that accompany these pieces.

Along with a piece entitled “No More,” showing a Jesus figure hugging a child and a skeleton who’s heart is being stolen from its chest, Ramona Maps wrote this in 2007, reflecting back to 1981:

Our Sundays were spent recognizing the Sabbath. I was unable to listen to the radio or play. My father made me spend four hours (timed) with him, reading the Bible outloud. Side by side, we sat together. I read while he navigated my reading by using a bookmark under each line, as I read it outloud. He did this to make sure I read slowly and clearly and didn’t skip ahead. I remember crying and shrieking many times when he woke me on Sundays. At times, he would even pull me up out of bed and force me downstairs to the kitchen table. I hated reading and hated reading the Bible. I found it so boring, and at times, torturous.

I remember clearly the first time we came to the very last page of the Bible. I felt relieved. We had finished. I thought it was over. The next Sunday, I was awoken, sat down and we started again at Genesis 1:1.

In my life, I believe I have read the Bible, cover to cover, eighteen times. There are marks in the back pages of my Bible under “Notes” for each time we finished.