Why outsider art

This term refers to untrained artists who depict largely realistic scenes, often in skilled detail, with people, animals, and other aspects of the observed world, sometimes combined with fantasy images. They often aspire to normal artistic status and may often be seen as quite sophisticated amateurs verging on professionalism.

The environments, buildings and sculpture parks built by intuitive artists almost defy definition. They have become known by various terms, Visionary Environments and Contemporary Folk Art Environments being perhaps the most appropriate in current use.

Although Outsider Art has been used to describe the environments, some feel the label to be insulting to these particular creators, many of whom are integrated members of their local communities. Another popular term, especially in the US, is Grassroots Art, which can also cover the more humble expressions and constructions of ordinary folk in both town and country.

My Account Search. What is Outsider Art? While the artist used magazine images and photographs as source material, his paintings were organic and often free-form. What sets Thornton Dial and Ronald Lockett apart from other Outsider artists — besides the fact that they were cousins — is that they worked in a particular landscape of the African-American South.

Living close together in Bessemer, Alabama, they both produced work that deals, in different ways, with poverty, racism and environmental degradation. The work of Dial, who was born in , was first informed by his employment as a steelworker at the Pullman Company, which produced railway carriages. Using materials such as rusted metal, he created sculptures that he then buried in his backyard.

When he retired from his day job in the s, he began making art full-time. As he became more famous, his work was shown at the Whitney Biennial in , in a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in , and in a massive touring retrospective organised by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He used found materials from his neighbourhood to create dense, layered paintings and drawings redolent of Rauschenberg and Pollock.

The finished pieces would have entirely different meanings without the incorporation of these materials. Much younger than his cousin, Ronald Lockett was born in and grew up observing the art being made around him. When he began creating his own work, it manifested itself in dark, complex assemblages that used materials including rusted metals and nails to explore dark moments in human history — the Holocaust, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the plight of Native Americans.

After Lockett contracted HIV in the early s, death became a central theme in his work. He began to use found objects that related to themes of regeneration — a repurposing of the discarded. Six years later he was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia, and institutionalised until his death in These pieces explored themes such as the railroad, the Virgin Mary, and his native country.

Although he remained largely unknown during his lifetime, since his death he has been the subject of international art exhibitions at institutions such as the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

In the United States Postal Service honoured his work by featuring five of his drawings on a series of limited-edition stamps.

Yoakum detail , January 2, Bill Traylor American, Untitled Man leading black dog detail , ca. Introduction What is outsider art? Imagination American, Untitled Totem , n. Composite stone and found objects, 80 x 32 x 30 in. Wolfson, Click any image below to see examples of outsider art. Previous Post How to: Get Intuit. Everything you can see, passer-by, is the work of one peasant, who, out of a dream, created the queen of the world He later recounted how "I was walking very fast when my foot caught on something that sent me stumbling a few meters away, I wanted to know the cause.

In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves, I cannot express it well I told no one about it for fear of being ridiculed and I felt ridiculous myself. Then fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten my dream, when I wasn't thinking of it at all, my foot reminded me of it. My foot tripped on a stone that almost made me fall. I wanted to know what it was It was a stone of such a strange shape that I put it in my pocket to admire it at my ease.

The next day, I went back to the same place. I found more stones, even more beautiful, I gathered them together on the spot and was overcome with delight It's a sandstone shaped by water and hardened by the power of time.

It becomes as hard as pebbles. It represents a sculpture so strange that it is impossible for man to imitate; it represents any kind of animal, any kind of caricature. I said to myself: since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture".

For the next thirty-three years he collected stones that he found on his daily mile mail route and took them home to add to the project, often working at night with the light of an oil lamp. At first he put the stones in his pockets, but he later began using a basket and eventually a wheelbarrow.

It took him twenty years just to complete the outer walls. He carried out the entire project without any assistance. Cheval wished to be buried in his Palais , but French law forbade it. He thus spent the final eight years of his life constructing his own mausoleum at the Hauterives cemetery. Ernst even created a collage titled The Postman Cheval in In Cheval and his magical ingenuity was commemorated on a French postage stamp.

Sometimes she painted what appears to be a conventional bouquet or a typical still-life, but more often than not her images are surreal hybrids between trees and flowering bushes. There is no botanical accuracy to the project; it is a frenzied attempt to show something of life's beauty. Interestingly, although the artist used oil paints, her pictures are unusually waxy in appearance and experts cannot be sure what other ingredients she added to the mix.

Sadly, the artist did not get a chance to experience her success as she was permanently institutionalized from onwards. Content compiled and written by Alexandra Duncan. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Rebecca Baillie.