"OUTSIDER ART" : Museums, serious art collectors, and art historians,
have more and more turned their attention toward "Outsider Art"
including art accomplished by persons with Schizophrenia and other
diagnoses, and those "Outside the Mainstream"....
Yet a further dynamic often accidentally springs out of this
positive interest and regard. Well meaning, but inevitably and
tautologically impossible, attempts have been made by the "Inside"
to define or validate what "qualifies" as "Outsider Art" or even
as "Schizophrenic Art".
The energetics by insider circles to validate outsider art are,
indisputably and powerfully, healthy energetics.
However, to step further, and to purport to establish definining criteria,
based on stylistic, thematic, or contextual elements, is to step too far.
The latter dynamic results in a new and even more strangling
artifice or construct.
The reality is that both those "outside the mainstream"
and those "within the domain of schizophrenia" create whatever they
feel moved to create, and their work refuses to fall within
the tight sphincter of restrictive definitions.
(Clockwise and concentrically inward, starting from outside center): Joan & Joan, Astrid's drawing,
Dawit with self-portrait, "Cecilia" drawing by Astrid, Darlene, "Sonya" digital etching by Astrid,
Gary Brown, Dawit & Dawit (again), Astrid's drawing again (rendered from life from a 1930's sculpture by
WPA artist, Maxine Albro), Bart, (standing center left),
Gary Brown, two passing unidentified Skid Row street soldiers, Gary Brown's geometric
abstracts in the Lamp Art Project studio window and one by Gary's side,
and Xochitl Gabriela Maria Casillas y Orozco, (center, kneeling).
Below: Penny Kirk with "Joan of Arc", oil on canvas, and
Ed Christiansen with Abstraction, acrylic on canvas,
(Photo taken directly outside of Lamp Art Project.
New Terminal Hotel in background, across street, to the right).
Darlene's "New Terminal Hotel", oil on canvas, is below photo.
Ed Christiansen working on paintings outside Art Project.
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