Outsider art reminds us that creativity is a birthright, not a career path.
I was reading about outsider art the other day on substack. It was very interesting.
Coined by artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s, art brut literally means “raw art.” It was about art made by people in asylums, prisons, or complete obscurity. People who probably didn’t even know they were making “art” at all. They were just doing it, creating something, anything, almost compulsively, obsessively. Sometimes with bottle caps. Sometimes with human hair. Sometimes with a thousand biro pens and a dream, or gluing matchsticks to a life-size papier-mâché giraffe in a garden shed in Norfolk. In other words, outsider art.
In a world where everything is curated, filtered, and optimized for engagement, outsider art is gloriously resistant to polish. It’s the antidote to art speak and the enemy of cool. It’s where sincerity still lives, sometimes in the form of an intricately carved wooden toaster that doubles as a shrine to a lost cat. And frankly, that’s beautiful.
Because maybe art doesn’t need to be clever. Or commercially viable. Or made in a Hackney studio with exposed brick and oat milk flat whites on tap. Maybe it just needs to be.
I sometimes think my daughter, who has a wonderful Fine Art degree, may have struggled with her tutors because, although none of us saw it at the time, what she was making might have been outsider art. Someone who carefully collects their own eyelashes and eyebrows, then uses them to create a tiny, painstaking self-portrait — that’s not just creative, it’s deeply personal. There was such quiet intensity in it, such focus, and not the faintest concern for whether it fit into anyone else’s idea of what art should be. Looking back, it makes perfect sense.
Giving people a title for what they do helps define them to others. Apparently, outsider art is the height of fashion, and museums are mounting major exhibitions. Collectors are shelling out silly money. Auction houses are whispering reverently over cracked canvases painted by people who didn’t even know about acrylics. The once-marginalised is now curated; it’s institutionalised and Instagrammed.
I do wonder if it is it still outsider art when it’s hanging next to a Hockney? Is it still rebellious or couldn’t-care-less when it’s being endorsed by the establishment it was supposedly outside of? I’m a bit confused to be honest!
Here’s a few links to some outsider artists if you’re interested.
Henry Darger – Chicago janitor by day, creator of a 15,000-page fantasy epic by night. His world: part Victorian fairytale, part fever dream, part “should we be worried?”
Judith Scott – Deaf, with Down syndrome, and institutionalised for decades, she made intricate cocoon-like sculptures from yarn and found objects.
Madge Gill – A spiritualist who produced thousands of drawings, often guided (she claimed) by a spirit named Myrninerest. As you do.
Howard Finster – A Baptist preacher who built his own garden museum filled with visions of Elvis, God, and aliens. Pretty standard, really.
Outsider art is what happens when you remove the polite conversation and gallery lighting from creativity.
So here’s to the garden shed geniuses, the obsessive scribblers, the glue-gun prophets. I’m off to carry on with my flowers. It gives one courage to just do stuff and stop worrying that it’s good enough for judgement.
