Outside Art- the Brut within

copyright:CynthiaLottVogel

I'm reading a book by a woman named Abigail Thomas....In it she talks about "Outsider Art"- or "Art Brut"

"Art Brut: literally translated from French means "raw art"; 'Raw' in that it has not been through the 'cooking' process: the art world of art schools, galleries, museums. Originally art by psychotic individuals who existed almost completely outside culture and society." Wikipedia

copyright: CynthiaLottVogel

One of the raw artists, the outsiders made the statement in the book, "What is art anyway, except not pounding the walls?"  This is truth.  As an artist I've been both an "Insider" and an "Outsider" - I have been trained as an artist but sometimes when I paint you see the artist and not the training.  You see the pain that bids me paint --or else I shall slice my arms and dip my hair in the blood to use as brush. When in these times, when I am creating in order to avoid pounding the walls...my art is real.  More true than it is beautiful.  More raw than it is refined.

copyright: Cynthia Lott Vogel

I do not paint like that often enough.  It brings me too close to emotions that can destroy me.  It frightens me.  But at times when I am mad, it gives me a bridge to sanity.  It is a rail to ride to keep from ruining myself. my life.  It is a link to a part of myself that knew what to do with images, paint and color.  The problem emerges when it links the part of me comfortable with line and form to the visceral piece of my innards that pulses raw and bleeding; that emotes and screams aloud as it traces desperate finger-claws down the padded walls and  pounds on barred windows of recollection.

By Stephen Judges

It is a fine tightrope walk....a tenuous balancing of scales over molten coals...and it is one that I need to delve more bravely....more frequently.  But to produce art like that you have to bring yourself to the point of wall pounding and then make the left turn to the pastels, the watercolors and be carried by those shudders of pain to the sanity seeking, lined learning, paint smudging, charcoal grubbing GRIP of the materials whose very tactility speaks to the ordering of my mind....That lost little girl who wanders amongst the images of people who dance in the light fixtures  and who finds her way out with a stick of vine charcoal on smudged and dusty white paper, grinding an unwilling eraser into the murk to seek form that has meaning.

In the hospital I turned up my nose at the dry magic markers and broken craypas.  The therapist said, "If you are a real artist; the materials will not matter....they will not stand in the way of creating art."  Her challenge bit me...tore through my snobbery and compelled me to accept the offering of the vine charcoal with humility.  I drew several pieces...one of which landed up mostly on the jacket of the inmate who leaned an unwary back against my picture hanging from its proud post there on the wall.

Art.

Sanity.

Gropings.

Treading one's path through the molten lava of madness and coming out on the other side with a relic of the path traveled.