If you see the shape of Iceland resembling a feathery chicken facing Greenland, the beak poking into the North Atlantic in the remote West Fjords would be Selárdalsland.

Which is where, at the end of a 25 km gravel road outside the tiny town (206 people) of Bildardalur, you’ll find Listasafn (Museum) Samúel Jónssonar. Although we prefer the artist’s name for it—Samúel Jónsson’s Art Farm.

We don’t remember how we found out about this place. Maybe a brochure at the Harbour Inn the night before in Bildardalur? Waking with the chickens, we arrived at the Art Farm early in the morning and as you’d expect, had the place to ourselves.

Before you pass judgement on Samúel’s work—which art theorists would call naïve, folk or outsider art—knowing his background is helpful.

Born in the region in 1884, Samúel was only four years old when his father died. Early in life, he became the family’s breadwinner. “From scratch,” he built a home for he and his mother in Selárdalsland, where she died in 1916. After her death, Samúel hired a housekeeper named Salóme Samúelsdóttir. You can guess what happened next. The married couple lived on the Brautarholt farm and had three children; sadly, they all died at a young age. Here’s what people in the area at that time had to say about Samúel, according to the museum’s website:

It was said that no one traveled faster than him, and he was often consulted when there was a lot going on, such as when a midwife or doctor needed to be picked up. His whole countenance was cheerful and good-natured, for everyone was well disposed to him, and Samuel was thought exceptionally accommodating. He was knowledgeable about many things and well read, easy to talk to and thought to be a good speaker.

As a young man, Samúel had artistic ambition. But with all the farm work, it amounted to little more than a few paintings. In 1947, soon after the couple moved to the Selárdalur Valley, Salóme died. Two years later when Samúel reached the age of 65 and got a pension, he was finally able to devote his life to art.

Working alone with his fertile imagination, he spent his days creating paintings and sculptures, many of them based on images from his collection of books and postcards. When an altarpiece he designed for the church at Selárdalur was rejected by the local parish, he built a church of his own for it—with no electricity and therefore no power tools! When his collection mushroomed, he constructed a museum building for his paintings and sculptures.

Although his work received little or no publicity, even back then people came to see his art and buildings. The museum’s website says he was considered far ahead of his time; for example, he built toilet facilities for his visitors.

My favourite piece of Samúel’s art?

In his last years, Samúel, struggling with impaired vision, built a pathway of white seashells to the edge of the ocean so he could continue to find his way to the beach to get sand for the concrete he needed for his sculptures. A natural, artistic path, not unlike some of Andy Goldsworthy’s famous land art.

In 1968 when Samúel became completely blind, he moved into a nursing home in which he died a year later.

No one was left to take care of the Art Farm. The house and church weathered, the sculptures faded, the fountain stopped working.

Icelanders came to know about Samúel in 1976 when Hannibal Valdimarsson published the first article about the Art Farm and arranged for Samúel’s altarpiece to be moved to a gallery in Reykjavík for safekeeping.  Five years later, Ómar Ragnarsson, the country’s most popular filmmaker and journalist, made a documentary about Samúel’s life and work that included interviews with people who had known him.

Then, in 1998, the year before Kári Schram and Ólafur Engilbertsson premiered their documentary on Samúel’s life and art, an association was formed to preserve the Art Farm, which was given the name Listasafn Samúel Jónssonar. A museum, is this a museum you might ask?

In his book The Innocence of Objects, his manifesto for museums, Orhan Pamuk writes:

…The ordinary everyday stories of individuals are richer, more humane and much more joyful…It is imperative that museums become smaller, more individualistic and cheaper. That is the only way that they will ever tell stories on a human scale.

Restoration began in 2004, led by the German sculptor Gerhard König who supervised volunteers who came during the summers from Iceland and more than a dozen other countries. Every year, a group of volunteers from the non-profit SEEDS also works on preserving Samuel’s art. According to a plaque we saw onsite, the Association wants to transform the site into an artistic complex with a visitor centre and living spaces for visiting artists and scholars. The Association depends on funds from outside the government, relying, as the plaque reminded us, solely on various cultural and tourism contributions.

We didn’t know the term “Outsider Art” until researching this story.

Coined in 1972, it refers to creatives who are self-taught, unconventional, “supposedly naïve” artists. Outsiders with little or no affiliation or contact with the established art worlds and their conventions. People whose work, sometimes raw or rough or peculiar, may go unrecognized or undiscovered until after their death. Their personal obstacles may be remoteness, poverty, eccentricity, mental illness, poor health, being a woman, inability to afford an art education…

Having just finished reading Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, my appreciation for Samúel’s art grew. Precisely because it is outside the single metric—ATTENTION—by which culture is judged, dictated and flattened by the invasive machinations of the Silicon Valley autocracy. (One could say we’re helping them out, but little Latitude65, with no links to Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, X , etc., and no skills whatsoever in tubing readers to our site, is outside any sphere of influence.)

“I’m glad we made the trip to see it,” Magellan said when I asked how he felt about Samúel’s art. ‘Having loaded cement to put myself through university, it’s apparent that he used far too much aggregate, leading to premature degradation of his sculptures and buildings. His reason may have been cost. And likely weight as a bag of cement weighs 87.5 pounds. That I know because in our youth, my buddies John and Neil and I worked for Inland Cement—we used to throw three bags at a time!”

We don’t imagine anyone calling Samúel’s art beautiful. And we didn’t get to speak to anyone who had seen it; a young couple arrived when we were leaving, but even if we had lingered, they didn’t speak English.

But how do you define beautiful?

In Filterworld, Kyle quotes a line from the surrealist poet Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870) who went by the name of Isidore-Lucien Ducasse:

Beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

Navigation

Chayka, Kyle. Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2024.

Listasafn Samúels Facebook An incredible source showing the devotion of the reconstruction volunteers.

Samúel Jónsson Musuem.

“Samúel Jónsson, Chapel, museum and sculpture garden.” Outsider Environments Europe. December 21, 2012. “An inventory and documentary of art environments in Europe created by non-professionals,” is how this group describes themselves.

Visit West Fjords.