Henry Darger
The first time I saw Henry Darger was in Flash Art magazine in the mid-90s. I tore the page out and kept it just for me. I wondered who the hell could have ever painted something like this. […]

Anna Zemánková
Her drawings emanate sound – the sound which is there before it is pronounced and becomes transformed into words. […]

ACM
Intricate assemblies of reclaimed beauty, bits that have served their time as super-efficient hidden components which now show us how beautiful they are, after work. […]

George Thaxton GT Miller
I am fascinated by Guns Under the Table by GT Miller. Why?
1. It is utterly artless. I can’t see that it issues from western art in any way.
2. It is a tangle of perspective drawing which produces haywire optical illusions. […]

Calvin and Ruby Black
Like many people I have a bad penchant for handmade signs, the ambitious bursts of entrepreneurial energy behind every sign, the astounding surprises that emerge from the grey economy of amateur graphic design. I covet these signs but when I finally harass shop owners and street vendors into selling [them?] I find that when you take them home they often refuse to work anymore. […]

Emery Blagdon
Emery Blagdon’s painting are unusual. Much outsider art employs devices and techniques we associate with art of the 20th century, although quite independently of it. […]

Carlo Zinelli
Colours, figures, shapes and letters line up to form sentences to be read from right to left, from top to bottom, the other way around and backwards. What do they tell us? […]

Morris Hirshfield
I started my first gallery in 1963 when I was 23 years old. But the avant-garde art I was showing was not widely known in Switzerland, so I had no clients. I was also interested in outsider art – that is to say art outside the normal trends of art history – as well as folk art and so-called naïve art. […]

Anonymous (The Magic House)
Magic House is the work of a cabinetmaker productive during the 1830-1850 period. It is two stories high, topped by a charming bell tower with bell ringers, and a four-sided clock guarded by soldiers. […]

Tomislav Sava Čarapić
New York, 1990’s. I was living in an apartment on 56th and 9th and on the corner of 57th and 9th was a derelict building. I noticed that someone was painting on spreadsheets of the New York Times and pasting them up there. I photographed him surreptitiously performing some strange ritual-like movements in the snow one winter. […]

Henry Darger
Henry Darger is legendary at this point. His work and its discovery form a perfect mythical narrative – mythical in the sense of touching a deep reaction in us, not mythical in the sense of the work or his life being untrue. […]

William Scott
Creative Growth in Oakland is a great place. In a nutshell, folks who don’t quite fit in (either because they are autistic or have other disabilities) are given art materials and a place to work. The work is sold to help pay for the costs of the center. […]

Morton Bartlett
Morton Bartlett: My hobby is making plaster sculptures. Its purpose is the same as all good hobbies: to release the urges which don’t find an outlet through other channels.
Julie: Father began one day in 1936 when he absent-mindedly picked up a ball of clay and started to massage it and work it lovingly into a head. […]

Louis Wain
Louis Wain, my all time favourite painter. […]

Henry Darger
Maxims after Henry Darger in no particular order: An adult is a child as a beast. Children are ciphers of joy. Men become men through their uniforms. Color is sex, disembodied. The feeling of infinitude is composed of a finite set following a law of form carelessly. Nature is what binds art to the promesse de bonheur. […]

Edmund Monsiel
How can something that is small contain something that is even smaller, and so on to the infinite? Edmund Monsiel saw God in 1943. After having had his first vision, he employed about 500 pieces of paper to describe it, filling his sheets with the most minute trait from edge to edge. […]

Carlo Zinelli
If you’re not an idiot, use your eyes! Carlo Zinelli, speaking to a critic who enquired what his drawings meant. […]

George Widener
I don’t care much for statistics. I can’t remember dates and numbers. I rarely know when something actually happened, sometimes I don’t even know when something is happening. I’ve always been impressed by art that deals with numbers, by people with good memories for facts. But at the same time, they can be very cold and calculated, so they generally don’t move me. […]

Pavel Petrovitch Leonov
Most naïve artists live a hard life. But the story of Pavel Leonov reveals a strange tale of comedy and tragedy. […]

Willem van Genk
I don’t remember when I first encountered the work of Willem van Genk. In a way he was always there. He was right: trains are essential for our lives and especially for our dreams. He is my favourite artist. […]

Herman Bossert
Heaving deep sighs, as always, he comes into the gallery. Herman Bossert’s cities sigh too. They are old and tired, thin and brittle, yet filled with such pow- er and pride. They rear up in glory, although the end is nigh. I’m startled and I resist. […]

Bill Traylor
Bill Traylor’s paintings offer no clue to his past. They are simple things. An image of a horse. A man wearing a top hat smoking a cigarette. A woman holding a jug. And I find it impossible to look at them without thinking about what they don’t say. […]

Aloïse Corbaz
I remember seeing the film by Liliane de Kermadec on Aloïse years ago and being so moved by the story of this Swiss governess who had lived so many misfortunes during her lifetime. At the first occasion I went to see her paintings at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, started by Dubuffet. […]

Bill Traylor
Bill Traylor, who was considered a prodigy during his childhood, will always be remembered as a visual prophet. Born into slavery, his talent was apparent early in his lifetime. […]

Martín Ramírez
Martín Ramírez was one of the great artists of the last century. His works are spiritually related to the Belgian Surrealism I grew up with (Ensor, Magritte, Delvaux, Broodthaers, Panamarenko), with a touch of Mexican folklore, and a slightly manic fascination for relief-like patterns that might be an expression of his illness, for which he was hospitalised. […]

Tomoyuki Shinki
I am a trained architect. I was working for a company as an in-house designer and started to encounter artwork by people with developmental disabilities. I thought it would be interesting to invite one or two staff members with disabilities to my home to draw outside working hours. The workshops became very popular. My guests started to invite their friends and before long we couldn’t all fit in my room. […]

(Interview with The Museum of Everything)
I work in construction and as a lecturer at the Nizhny Novgorod State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering. Most of my work is dedicated to the environmental issues caused by human interaction with nature. Please describe your art. […]

Nek Chand Saini
It’s easy to imagine Nek Chand Saini creating his monumental Rock Garden in the remote city of Chandigarh north of Delhi, India. Day after day, every evening, returning back to his little bit of paradise for 30 years, collecting broken plates, bowls, dis- used plug sockets, broken bangles and bottle tops from the side on India’s notorious railway tracks. […]

(Interview with The Museum of Everything)
I have drawn one sketch a day for fourteen years.
Where do you do your work?
Just like an artist has an indoor studio, so I have a natural studio. I draw around the area where I live in Nizhny Novgorod. […]

Aloïse Corbaz
In Love with Love. Aloïse draws women who look at us without seeing us. They are all so feminine, too feminine; they stand tall, proud, still, solitary. They are beautiful and covered with jewels, their hair cascades around them. […]

Madge Gill
Madge Gill worked in solitude and darkness for most of her life. With a humble single tool, usually a black biro, she had a compulsive ability to create the tiniest detail, a kaleidoscope of repeated faces and weaving fields of pattern on a minute scale. She could realize her subconscious with ease and make her wonderful imagination seem dark and free with uninfluenced thoughts. It is this that inspires me. […]

Anna Zemánková
We are not alone, we are one, say the paintings of Zemánková. Why do we find the design of a petal, a seed, a leaf so beautiful? Because, through the eyes, we find our conscience. […]

George Widener
I identify strongly with George Widener’s inner voice (I too am drawn by the lustre of the apocalypse). His drawings serve as a kind of mantra, used to avert future calamity. They catalogue the fear latent in numbers, and that uncanny symmetry which can be found in uncontrollable forces. […]

Morton Bartlett
When I first came across the works of Morton Bartlett it was the context of their crea- tion that fascinated me more than the works themselves. These dolls and photographs seem less like sculptures and pictures, more like fetish objects created as a healing ritual for a traumatised unconscious. […]

Nek Chand Saini
Nek Chand Saini has come to personify the spirit of Chandigarh as much as Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier’s buildings in Chandigarh appear to have landed from above, from another world, which is literally true. Yet they are uniquely of Chandigarh. Nek Chand Saini’s magical work emerges from the earth and from the city, a fashioning of things that already existed into things in whose presence you are transported into another world. […]

Alfred Jensen
In the visual arts, it is not about understanding; it is about feeling. The work shines from within and erases any need for boring debate. That’s what I like about Alfred Jensen’s work. […]

George Widener
We live in an age unthinkable without the constant calculations and mechanical recordings performed invisibly in countless computers. Unseen, it all just happens, in a virtual and acutely ephemeral space. […]

Augustin Lesage
In 1911, the miner Augustin Lesage was working in a tunnel when a mysterious voice revealed his true destiny to him after 35 years of labouring in the mines: he should become a painter. As a result, Lesage embarked on a new career. Séances kept him constantly in touch with the voice, which now gave him detailed instructions as to how to go about the realisation of his work. […]

Guo Fengyi
I first encountered her work when I was in Beijing working on the China: The Three Emperors from the Qing Dynasty exhibition at the Royal Academy. I went out to the 798 Factory Dashanzi in the suburbs of Beijing and to see lots and lots of studios and artists. But one thing stood out: the large banner-like drawings by Guo Fengyi … they were outstanding, like huge flags. […]

William Dawson
My first purchase of self-taught art cost $432. The date was September 13, 1986, and the seller was the legendary art dealer Phyllis Kind in Chicago. Thus began my 25-year addiction. […]

Nek Chand Saini
Nek Chand Saini differs from many outsider artists in both the scale of his endeavour and in the fact that he is primarily a sculptor. […]

Guo Fengyi
Guo Fengyi was a self-taught artist who lived in Xi’an, China. After becoming ill in the late 1980’s, she began practicing Qigong as a means to alleviate her illness, strengthening her health through an understanding of the body’s energy flows, and eventually developing the Penguin style of Qigong. […]

Sam Doyle
Sam Doyle was on a beautiful lifelong plateau as an artist. When I look at his pictures alarm bells go off, warning me of their power. It is as if the pictures themselves know you are looking at them. PS I dedicated a painting to him in 1985 titled Where Are You Going Man? Do You Dig Me?, my verbal translation of a painting he did in 1980. […]

George Thaxton GT Miller
The commercial art sensibility of GT Miller’s work appealed to me immediately. With the directness and immediacy of political placards they show care and craft in their execution, and display a functional clarity unusual in this genre. I identify and empathise with the feelings he expresses. They are hymns for the self-employed. […]

Charles AA Dellschau
There is something amazingly intricate and beautifully luminescent about the remarkable pages torn from the aeronautical sketchbooks of one Charles AA Dellschau, probably the most – and potentially the only – alumnus of the Sonora Aero Club. […]

Reverend Jesse Howard
I have been ripping off these guys for years. If you’re interested in being an artist don’t go to art school, just make stuff and sell it. About 20 years ago I bought a book, Self Taught Artists of the USA. It’s a homage to the autodidact. Reverend Jesse Howard’s work is great and an example of this honesty. […]

Dietrich Orth
There is no shortage of self-taught artists whose work renders the line between insider and outsider art fairly useless, but Dietrich Orth’s eccentric paintings confuse the distinction in a style all their own. […]

Charles AA Dellschau
Dellschau’s story couldn’t have been made up. It is one of the classic discoveries of outsider art: voluminous notebooks found
in a dump are snapped up by Dominique de Menil. […]

Madge Gill
As a child I used to hear voices. For a while they visited me every night and I would often appear in the living room where my parents were sat watching TV, saying: It’s the voices, stop the voices. If I were to choose any imagery to accompany those voices it would be the work of Madge Gill. […]

James Castle
The human need to grab control of the world finds an outlet through language. James Castle refused to learn any form of language. He chose for himself to stay completely out- side ideas and systems except for his own. Sound, with its flutterings and disappearances, isn’t in his world. Not even the idea of silence exists for him. […]

Nek Chand Saini
Surely Nek Chand Saini never thought that his hobby creations, which remained secret for 18 years, would be pioneered as an important art movement in India. He would never have dreamt he would stand among the great masters and receive unmatched recognition and the most prestigious awards. […]

Emery Blagdon
Emery Blagdon’s artworks existed in isolation for years. These are objects that are inseparable from and borne from their function, machines for healing that just happened to have a sculptural form. […]

JB Lemming
The Energy of the Erotic Gaze Sexual energy is activating the space. The space which is activated further activates the energy. An electric shock to the genitals forms post-flash images which are optically active. The gaze charged by these active post-flash images recalls that moment of sexual energy for the outside world. They Boogie Woogie with intense pleasure. […]

Morton Bartlett
The first piece of art that I ever bought was a Morton Bartlett print, Girl with Red Scarf. She is fair and blonde with a fuzzy red hat and scarf. She is looking down at me now as I write. […]

Calvin and Ruby Black
The Mojave Desert is a dismal, barren, godforsaken place. It is not one of California’s romantic deserts, or a vacation spot, it is just somewhere you pass through to get to somewhere else. To this day only outcasts, loners, and brave eccentrics call it home. […]

Louis Wain
Louis Wain’s paintings can be humorous, cats playing golf or sipping tea, playfully taking on the human characteristics which he projected on to them. Other cats are immersed in detail and pattern; swirls of colour and violent, sharp, jagged shapes. […]

Emery Blagdon
The next time you see a small circle of metal glinting in the surface of a piece of wood, think of all the nails that have ever been hammered home in the world. The nail, chief- tain of the wire tribe, always car- ries with it the weighty sense of purpose of the individual who drove it through the timber. […]

James Castle
James Castle Land: a territory of soot and cardboard, where place is bound to the construction of space. His work is the product of a strong organizing principle, a systematic mapping. That’s how Castle describes everything, through geometry. It’s what helps make his work so compelling. […]