outsider art handbook

Outsider is a convenient catch-all term for art that unprofessional, uncool, unhip and lax on things like perspective and graphic accuracy. It resembles children's art, or can do; it resembles the art of the insane, or can do. It includes so-called naive art as well as clever experiments by formerly or otherwise mainstream artists. Like the term 'street photography' it is more use as a description of how the artist feels and how it can motivate the artist; it is what you might call 'a permission description'. And that is a jolly good thing as many people feel as they formerly did about writing pre-internet (the internet made writing democratic) which was that it was the preserve of the skilled and devoted and sunday painters beware....

So, having justified its own existence here are a few bon mot for would-be outsider artists:

1. Academic art training is like opera training. Do you like opera or do you prefer jazz, pop or world music?

2. Be untrained and proud of it. Art is about doing something with conscious limitation: a frame is the most basic and most powerful limiter. Use your inability as a frame; or at least be conscious of it as something useful rather than a negative thing.

3. If you run out of things to paint imagine looking through an electron microscope at something.

4. Don't over associate with the mental health issues surrounding outsider art. the moment you use some disability as a 'badge of authenticity' the art is using YOU not the other way round.

5. The quest for authenticity never ends.

6. Mainstream art is scared of religion, happiness, joy, spirituality (apart from death soacked versions of the aforementioned). Go anywhere mainstream art is scared to go...

7. Mainstream art is scared of smiles and eyes (look at the blank unseeing eyes on so many "20th century masterpieces"). Go there.

8. Be anecdotal. Tell stories. 

9. If you can master grey and pink you are ahead of the game.

10. Lines are nice to look at. There is a reason ancient art often involves two or three outlines.