“…It isn’t easy, being an outsider. Once elected, there are appearances to be kept up: the solitary lifestyle, the nutty habits, the freedom from artistic influences. Above all, indifference to earning money. Scrounging for canvas and paint, going without luxuries such as food and socks, are all part of the life of austerity that one’s public demands. In the end, the outsider’s surest way of proving his integrity is to be dead.” – Albert Louden, quoted in Raw Vision magazine.
Whether Louden is an “outsider” or not is a matter of debate, but visiting the Louden show at Callan Park Gallery today I felt I was certainly experiencing an art of internal necessity (to use Herbert Read’s term). I also had a great time talking to Peter Fay, gallery minder for the day and source of interesting insights into Louden and his art.
Peter sees Louden’s figurative couples as disconnected, and there’s a strong sense of this for me as well. Some of these couples seem to engage in a visual crossover – as though forming an “X” mark against the relationship depicted; a mark against its disconnection, its dysfunctional nature? Pure conjecture on my part of course, but there seems no Buberian I-Thou here.
And from this 2000 Observer article on his work: “Louden calls them his ‘internal landscapes’ and says he has no idea where they come from or what they mean. ‘I think they’re odd,’ he says, ‘but not depressing. I’ve destroyed sackfuls of them in the past because they came out vicious or nasty.’”
And these possibly complex and enigmatic relationships and dispositions that Louden depicts reside in flowing, colourful landscapes, often with an attention to horizons and expressive skies, helping the works’ strong dream associations.
I’m left with the sense of psychic dances or dramas unfolding.
Then there’s his abstracts (or are they all abstracts?), in which the characters seem to have become atomised into bubbling fields of psychic energies and “selflets”. They’re complex works – see the detail below from one of these tortuous meanderings.
There’s lots more on this man and his art on the web – and debates as to whether someone’s still an outsider when he’s been (after working for 20 years) suddenly embraced by the establishment (as happened to Louden upon his 1985 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery); and subsequently dropped by that same establishment. But Louden evidently works the same way he always has – making works in quite humble conditions, and leaving them untitled and undated, driven more by internal concerns than those of the market.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting. I wrote just a few days ago, the following for my second SoFoBoMo book:
Daryl Sharp commented about this journey, the search for wholeness and meaning and those who have dared this journey by saying that those:
“… who have heard the call to an individual life, are the chosen ones. Under cover and by devious paths they set forth to their destruction or salvation, seeking by direct experience of the eternal roots. Following the lure of the restless objective psyche, they find themselves alone in the wilderness. Will they save their souls, become personalities? Will they individuate? Discover who they are, really?” (Sharp, Who Am I Really?, p. 134, 1995.)
Yes, that’s what excites me about outsider artists, the Self continues its indefatigable attempts to shine forth, irrespective of the standing of the artist in the conventional art world.
Thanks for your comment Robert.