outsider art

[Guest]

recently i have come across with what is known as "outsider art", take the time to explore it and you will be amazed. don't see just the pictures, read some of the artists history and it is truly "outsider". i have once seen a guy in brasil that made a house and a garden by himself, too. but i have seen in on a documentary many years ago, and i can't remember his name...

http://www.adolfwoelfli.ch/
http://www.nekchand.com/
http://animulavagula.hautetfort.com/alb ... val/page1/
and many, many more... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art

 

[Guest]

Maaaaaan, this stuff is awesome!
I only read about Adolf Wölfli right now, but his work is amazing!
Makes you think how unbelievably close psychosis and psychedelics are.

"The images Wölfli produced were complex, intricate and intense. They worked to the very edges of the page with detailed borders. In a manifestation of Wölfli's "horror vacui", every empty space was filled with two small holes. Wölfli called the shapes around these holes his "birds."

His images also incorporated an idiosyncratic musical notation. This notation seemed to start as a purely decorative affair but later developed into real composition which Wölfli would play on a paper trumpet.

Adolf Wölfli
"Saint-Mary-Castle-Giant-Grape," 1915
From "Geographic and Algebraic Books"
(This one is awesome, but a big too big to post)

Preeeeeeeeetty cooooooooooollors!

A little more contemporary: Robert Crum

And Jesse Crum :thumbsup:

 

[tryptonaut]

I recently saw a documentary on the art collection of Hans Prinzhorn, a German art historian and psychiatrist, who collected the works of numerous psychotic patients in hospitals around Germany.
I was blown away by these psychedelic works of art. The motivation of the patients and what they said about their works reminded me of someone on a high dose of psychedelics. One psychiatrist said that these patients often suffer from a dissolution of reality and ego and therefore grab onto new concepts of reality, often a reality that is ruled by magic. Sound familiar?

They said that at the time of Prinzhorn, even he as an art historian did not always recognize works of art like this installation: http://prinzhorn.uni-hd.de/galerie/marie-lieb.shtml
because at the time there were no artists doing "installations". The photos of these kind of works were taken by doctors only to document the behaviour of a patient.