Outsider art, partI
by rebecca ~ December 6th, 2005. Filed under: Poems & art.
As some of you know, I am a big fan of art brut and outsider art, which to me means any art that comes deep from the heart and had to be done for the maker, and such art doesn’t follow the rules of academic art schools. It is not about money, or approval, or status, or technique, but about personal vision.
Most people associate outsider art with the art created by people who are pushed to the margins of society: the poor, the abused, those with abilities unique from the rest of us, the unschooled, the imprisoned, the ostracized, the eccentric, etc., and it’s true that such folks often make fabulous art simply beacuse they don’t think in the same-old, same-old patterns.
Yet, I think outsider art is more than that. It is done by those rare few who have special visions to express that transcend the prison their society had hoped to shut them up in.
I am a big fan of such work because it shows us a wholly special, yet truthful way of seeing our world.
Anyway, there was a month-long art exhibit at the central public library that I stumbled upon one day. I went back the last day of the exhibit just to photograph my two favorites, both done by the same individual. Although there were other good paintings there, these two struck me as amazing. The artist is anonymous, only said to be a person who lives in a group home somewhere in the Asahikawa area.
As an aside: I just finished my last paper for my post-grad certificate in Education & Technology from UBC, Vancouver. I loved the course, Indigeneity and Technology. I loved the challenge of studying something I didn’t know much about (and I still have a lot to learn…). Now what to do, what to do. On my list: bake cookies and pies, read books with my son, go sledding, take a trip to Sapporo, paint and write, and read all those books my mom sent me. Oh, and sleep more.
Happy Holidays to you and yours!