Raw Vision Sourcebook
Raw Vision was first published in 1989 with the express purpose of bringing the phenomena of Outsider Art to a wide public. The first edition of Raw Vision presented works known to just a handful of people around the world. It has since continued to feature new discoveries of Outsider artists and unknown places such as sculpture gardens and extraordinary self-made buildings and remains the world’s only international journal of the art of the ‘unknown geniuses’ who are the creators of Outsider Art. Untrained, unschooled and uninfluenced by the conventional art world or art establishment, the work of these artists continues to stun and amaze. They invent their own forms, techniques and create private worlds.
I add this book to my list because heavy November grey skies, earlier this week, left me feeling in need of a bit of blue sky ‘viewing’, never mind ‘thinking’, and I enjoy a short deskbound South African interlude looking at the photographs of ‘The Owl House’ in the remote Karoo village of Nieu Bethesda, whilst the rain pours down outside. The Owl House and Camel Yard are pure mad, heart warming invention with a charming timeless quality. This is the creation of Helen Martins who, isolated from the local community and reclusive, worked for over 20 years with the everyday articles that surrounded her, forming a language of sun faces, a large number of owls and other images. Inside, all is set against a luminous backdrop of walls and ceilings coated with elaborate patterns of crushed glass embedded in brightly coloured paints, ‘glass and light’. Outside, in ‘The Camel Yard’, a kaleidoscope muddle of cement sculptures crowds, with a curious mix of Christian and Eastern philosophies and a predominant theme of the Nativity. Locals looked on her work with suspicion and derision but it is now internationally recognised and her ‘Owl House’, a national monument.
Meanwhile, while you can, check out the latest addition to the London art scene, the ‘Museum of Everything’ Museum of Everything a temporary exhibition, scheduled to remain open until Christmas. A celebration of one of the least explored areas of art collecting, naïve, folk and outsider art, brought together by James Brett, a maverick collector who has converted a rambling old recording studio into a glittering Aladdin’s cave of marvels. The exhibition includes work by Nek Chard, an Indian road worker who recycled the remnants of his own village to create a vast kingdom of recycled ceramic figures at the now famous Rock Garden at Chandigarh www.nekchand.com.
Posted by Katie Barr-Sim 10 months ago in
About Katie Barr-Sim
Katie is a business development director. She still wonders what she’ll be when she grows up but has always had a keen eye for design and a way with words.