Gene Merritt was an American artist based in Rock Hill, South Carolina, who never left his home state after suffering from brain damage as a boy. He was self-taught, and his access to the external world came primarily through television. Therefore, much of his work was centered around the celebrity phenomenon, with portraits being drawn from memory or otherwise loosely based off of celebrities seen in film or on TV. He began drawing in 1992, and primarily used ballpoint pen to piece together fragments of the celebrity’s figure like a puzzle. His work is noted in the Collection de l’Art Brut.
