Outside In: celebrating the intuitive nature of outsider art

There is an appreciation and valuing attached to work that strives to be intuitive. It can have significant cultural and financial value, especially if the artist is articulate and able to explain their rationale and reasons for creating the work. The same is not true for artists who work intuitively but have developed their work outside of formal art training or without a contextual awareness of the art world. Such overlooked but truly insightful and intuitive artists will often be neurodivergent or may have a disability.

This difference in attitude towards the value of their work could be seen as an inherent prejudice towards people who are disabled or behave differently. Their works are often seen as childish and uninformed. If we do not grasp the nettle of prejudice and stigma, we are doing an injustice to countless artists, alive and dead, who have not been accorded the common decency of being seen to have the right to create or whose work is perceived as being without value.

A few artists – the truly intuitive – have crossed this divide, such as Judith Scott (1943-2005), Alfred Wallis (1855-1942), Scottie Wilson (1891-1972), or Hilma af Klimt (1862-1944), but these are the exceptions. Far too many artists labelled as ‘naive’ or ‘primitive’ have been lost from our history, collections and culture. If an artist has made the transition from the margins of culture, this has often been a matter of good luck or through a respected member of the art elite recognising the value of their work. This was the case with Alfred Wallis, famously ‘found’ by Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) and Christopher Wood (1901-1930), but also with Scottie Wilson, who was championed by Picasso and others.

For Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, Wallis provided the validation of the simplicity of style that they were seeking in their work. It gave them a model and a means to arrive at a new way of working, but it is clear that both paraphrased Alfred Wallis’s work in theirs, including his use of perspective, handling of paint and most tellingly the boats that seemed to have sailed from one artist to each of the others.

It is interesting to reflect on what these endorsements represent – in essence the gateway to acceptance, the invisible threshold that so many artists have found impossible to cross. The people with the power in these instances are well-respected artists who the art establishment has bought into, both financially and intellectually, enabling them to forego their prejudice.

When working with artists on the periphery of the art world, it is noticeable how some of them have maintained an innate way of creating and expressing themselves. It may be that by circumstance, which some might even consider fortuitous, they have bypassed the conventional approach to making art drilled into all of us at an early age. Often left to develop their own techniques, styles and subject matter, they produce art that seems to have a more direct relationship to them and their lives. Many learning-disabled and neurodivergent artists are nurtured in supported studios. The best of these, such as Creative Growth in America and ActionSpace in England, have evolved ways of working that are tailored to the individual.

Supported studios often developed out of the closure of day services in the UK and frequently employ or are led by practising artists, such as the Community Art Project in Darlington and Project Art Works in Hastings. Supported studios could be seen as anachronistic survivors of the day centre model, a separation of people with disabilities from wider society. The collectivisation of disabled artists can feel uncomfortable and there is still progress to be made to reach the point where all artists are understood and supported as individuals, and the art world has made the effort to truly accommodate them.