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Trauma, flying saucers and the art of Ionel Talpazan

The creative activities of Ionel Talpazan (1955–2015) exemplify the features often attributed to self-taught ‘outsider’ artists who relentlessly pursue a uniquely personal vision, creating art that is outside the conventional art-world paradigms (Wojcik, 2016). Over the course of his life, Talpazan created more than 1000 works of art, inspired by his ideas about flying saucers and their travel throughout the cosmos. He said that he had ‘sacrificed his life to the UFO’ and his art explores the iconic aspects of UFOs as vehicles of utopian technology, cosmic wonder and otherworldly salvation. As refugee from Romania who had an extremely difficult life, Talpazan’s art also illustrates the possible therapeutic aspects of the creative process, as it helped him cope with the emotional trauma and ongoing adversity he endured. Talpazan was born Ionel Pârvu in Romania on 16 August 1955, in a small village northeast of Bucharest. He was born a twin, and premature, and his twin brother died a few days after birth, a loss that haunted Talpazan throughout his life. Talpazan’s parents were not married, and because of conflicts between them, he was sent away to be raised by his father’s parents, who later gave him up for adoption. This period of his childhood was especially painful, as his foster mother was violent, drank heavily and beat Ionel regularly. One day in the summer of 1963, after his foster mother beat him for losing a farm tool, he ran away, hiding in a ditch beneath a metal grate in a field, as it rained throughout the night. Suddenly the rain stopped, and he saw an enormous blue light overhead, and a glowing blue beam surrounded him. Recalling this event, Talpazan said, ‘I look and look at this light, it was blue energy that covered me, it was like from another world. The light was a beautiful color and moved in circles. There was no noise. It was very strange ... This was not a dream.’ At the time he did not understand the experience, but later came to believe that the blue