Departures of note

Ionel Talpazan, born Ionel Pârvu in 1955 in Petrâchioaia, Romania, was a self-taught outsider artist who became known in New York City in the late 1980s for his paintings of UFOs. His art was rooted in a childhood experience: at age eight, after running away from home to escape a beating, he claimed to have seen an 'enormous blue light overhead, and a glowing blue beam'—an event he later attributed to a UFO. From age 12, he obsessively drew hundreds of representations of this 'blue light' experience, a practice he continued for the rest of his life.

In March 1987, Talpazan and a friend swam across the Danube River to Yugoslavia at night to escape communist Romania. He was imprisoned and held in a refugee camp before being granted asylum as a political refugee. He then immigrated to New York City, where he worked as a manual laborer and continued making art. He began selling his work on the street, often from a regular spot on Prince Street in SoHo, and was at times homeless. He distrusted art gallerists and dealers, preferring to sell directly to passersby, and eventually retreated to a one-room apartment in Harlem.

Beginning in the 1990s, his work drew attention and was included in exhibitions reviewed by the New York Times and Artforum. His pieces were exhibited at the American Visionary Art Museum and in museums in London, Berlin, San Francisco, Madrid, and other countries. His work is now in the permanent collections of the American Museum of Folk Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Brut Collection Bruno Decharme, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the American Visionary Art Museum. Over his lifetime, he produced more than 1,000 works of art, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures of UFOs.

Shortly before his death on September 21, 2015, in New York at age 60, Talpazan changed his name to Adrian da Vinci and became a U.S. citizen. He described his art as showing 'spiritual technology, something beautiful and beyond human imagination,' and once said, 'The artist is like an astronaut... With the mind, you can travel the entire universe.'