Jaime Fernandes

Portugal, 1900-1969
Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1938, he was hospitalized for more than three decades at the psychiatric hospital Miguel Bombarda in Lisbon, where he would die in 1969. Jaime Fernandes unexpectedly started drawing at the age of 66, four years before his death, according to testimonies and references made to the drawings in the hospital’s medical records and in the letters he wrote to his wife. The whole set of his known work is composed of undated drawings, mainly made with colored ballpoint pens on different types of paper, where a reduced form of figures, especially imaginary animals, human or anthropomorphic figures, appears and reappears in countless variations, always drawn in a dense web of lines.