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Outsider art is generally an acquired taste.  To the uninitiated, it could appear to be the drawings of someone’s child.  When our little family began to first collect this form of art, a typical reaction by our friends was that we were framing our seven-year-old daughter’s school art.  I will admit … it took me awhile to warm up to it.  I thought it was a waste of money (sometimes I can be a real tightwad!).  Now that I have studied it, collected it, lived with it and admired it, I can say I love it.

It has been called art brut, naïve art, intuitive art, visionary art, art of the insane.  What it is not is folk art.  Folk art typically revolves around traditional methods, forms and social standards.  Outsider art is truly outside the realm of what we perceive as art, marginal and very “out there”.

Outsider art is really a type of art that peers into the artist’s soul.  There are no pretenses in it.  The artist is simply drawing, painting or sculpting what he or she is thinking about or feeling deep down inside.  It is a depiction of the world around them as they see it.  A lot of the work is religious and visionary in nature.  Many of the artists have extreme obsessions with a subject such as the Reverend Howard Finster’s vision that he should paint George Washington as he appears on the one-dollar bill, with lots and lots of bible verses. Or Benny Carter’s paintings of New York City which eerily depict two airplanes flying into the twin towers about a decade before it happened … actually naming one of the towers the “house of blues”.  Henry Darger, Mose T, Ulysses Davis, Danielle Jacqui, Bill Traylor, Joseph Yoakum, Tubby Brown, R.A. Miller, JACK, I could go on and on.

My main point is to enlighten yourself about the different types of art out there.  Collect what you love.  If I could collect ALL the art I love, it would be a mish mash of styles.  Cave art, da Vinci, Caravaggio, Mayan glyphs, Dali, Finster, Carter, Gaudi, Goya, O’Keefe, Claes Oldenburg …

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