- it's tricky / boring to make art about art. Hard to not be incredibly derivative, or just make some not so interesting satire out of it
- I'm studying outsider artists, as someone who is in arts education (in a way, the complete opposite of how they practice)
I started to think about why I first started looking at outsider art.
Aesthetically:
- Outsider Art can't so much be defined in terms of aesthetic because it's less of a grouping based on stylistic choices or even moral/ ethical ones, but the identity of the artists themselves. BUT, because of the way a lot of these artists work they share some similarities in that they are often "unconventional". This is why I started looking at them.
Howard Finster
Connected in a more theoretical / thematic way to my practice:
- in my own practice I've been thinking about making in ways that are intuitive or challenging to prettier / traditional aesthetics, and outsider art generally reflects this as it is work created without the pressures of institutions / training
- in the journals I am reading there is a lot of questioning of authenticity, in particularly in regards to Howard Finster's mass produced 25000+ paintings, and how when he became popular people became, maybe, less interested... it's a concept that caught me
- how outsider artists are often recording the environment around them...
From this I am thinking, in very broad terms of working practically for this project
- Challenging in my own practice / in illustration how far you can push things to look *bad*
- How do *bad* images become good
- How many time can you do a good thing before it becomes bad
- But! How can this really be strung along, without a smaller thematic concept to push it forward
- (This isn't how I definitely want to go, but is a point I'm thinking of at this point)
Project types I am interested in:
- Publication?
- Series of paintings? Series of prints?
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