c. 1966

"The Hills of Old Wyoming in the Valley of the Moon near Casper Wyoming"

American, 1890 - 1972

Yoakum was born in Missouri and traveled extensively in his youth, working a variety of jobs---including several with circuses---until he was about forty and settled in Chicago. In his seventies he began to produce the ball-point pen and colored pencil drawings for which he is known, in which the world is flattened out almost in the manner of a Persian miniature, creating visionary scenes of muted power and causing rocks and rivers, trees and clouds to conform to a stylized but organic system of patterning. No one knows whether his carefully labeled drawings were done from memory, reproductions, or imagination.