Ionel Talpazan

1955 - 2015

A self-taught visionary artist from Romania, Ionel Talpazan lived in New York where he filled his small studio apartment with art inspired by his visions of UFOs. Having filled the space with huge brightly colored canvases, sculptures, and large diagrams revealing the inner working of UFOs, Talpazan estimated he had created more than 1,000 works. At the age of seven, Talpazan ran away from his foster parents, having had a foster mother who drank heavily and used to beat him. While hiding in a ditch beneath a metal grate in a field, he saw an otherworldly blue light surround him. He was completely altered by this incident, feeling certain afterwards that the experience had been associated with a UFO, and by the age of twelve he had made hundreds of UFO drawings. Talpazan often wrote his thoughts and theories around his images, crowding the surface with text written in Romanian, English and his own hybrid language. Depicting cosmic wonder and freedom allowed him to escape the difficulties of his life. Talpazan viewed his work as a combination of art and science and he dreamt of sharing his visions and theories with NASA scientists and government officials, in order to explore and develop UFO technologies. ¹

Talpazan’s art and life are the focus of the forthcoming book by Daniel Wojcik (Professor of English and Folklore Studies at the University of Oregon) – Artist as Astronaut: The Otherworldly Art of Ionel Talpazan: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/artist-astronaut