Lectures on Contemporary Art: 7

The Uncanny and the Unbalanced*

Outsider, primitive and raw art

The desire to create images seems to be innate in humans. All children draw, progressing from uncontrolled scrawls to circles and then on to something that is intended to be a representation of something - mother, father, the sun, a house, themselves. Many of us go on to express ourselves in quite sophisticated ways; the naive direct statement becomes more knowing, more informed, slicker.

But there is also a group of creators who never fit into the official category of professional artists: psychiatric patients, self-taught visionaries, mediums. Their art has been designated as 'Art Brut' by Jean Dubuffet, and as 'Outsider Art' by Roger Cardinal. The work is raw, unpremeditated, exciting: 'spontaneous expressive outpourings from the well-springs of creativity' (Outsider Art, Colin Rhodes).