One of eight siblings, Purvis Young drew and painted as a child, and attended school until the ninth grade. He started to make art again when he was incarcerated for armed robbery. Living in Miami, Florida, he painted hundreds of his paintings on the walls of Goodbread Alley in the Overtown ghetto. A regular viewer of art books at the library, he had been inspired by a book in the late 1960s protest murals of Detroit.
He paints on anything that is around him, boards, plastic, and glass. When the public library found him drawing in their books, they gave him books that were about to be thrown away for him to use to make art. He used these as sketchbooks for his larger works. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and El Greco are his favorite artists, and he admires Abstract Expressionism and Japanese woodcuts, which he has seen in reproductions. Despite his aesthetic awareness, his work of the 1990s is simpler than those of the 1970s. His earlier work feature frames with detailed decoration and scenes in which there are jumps of scale between large faces and crowds of tiny people.
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