Joseph Garlock was a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe. He settled on the Lower East Side of New York but moved with his growing family to New Jersey, where he operated a private bus and, later, a fruit and vegetable market in Bloomfield. For a fifteen-year period after his retirement, in 1948, Garlock created around a thousand paintings and sculptures in a variety of styles and materials. In this self-portrait made in 1957, when the artist was in his seventies, he cradles a white dinosaur against his chest. The dinosaur is a work by Garlock that was exhibited the same year in a craft and hobby show at Bamberger’s Department Store in Newark. The idiosyncratic strategy he employs in this work results in a fascinating double image, as though the artist is masking his real self with a second skin that he holds in front of his body.

Stacy C. Hollander, "Self-Portrait," exhibition label for Jubilation|Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2012.