outsider art

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of the ‘outsider’ art scene – or ‘non-scene’ as it were. The music of Jandek and Mingering Mike, the carved birds of Robert Gardner – these things that have the raw energy of creation channeled towards a unique, pure purpose without any of that ‘art training’ garbage getting in the way. I’ve been to art school – it was a load of garbage, and I’m still awesome, so eat it, SUNY school system.

So, when Mike Drake introduced me to the art of Michael Lee Ford, it was exciting.

Featured in the obscure 1999 documentary ‘Outside the Lines’, Michael Lee Ford is an inmate who is currently serving a 35 year sentence in a Texas prison for a robbery committed in 1989. During the 23 hours in which he’s confined to his cell every day, Ford creates art, but because of his circumstances, he’s forced to create his paintings, drawings and sculptures out of untraditional materials – and the results are fascinating.

It’s hard not to try and look into the mind of someone who’s imprisoned and using art to express themselves. When Drake presented the idea of a book of drawings to Ford, Ford was enthusiastic enough to create art especially for this collection, which is ultimately composed of both this new art and Ford’s older art. The body of work is presented in over 50 pages of uninterrupted, unedited images, folds and tatters and all. Leaving in the folds, by the way, was an excellent, organic, and undistracting choice. There’s a certain veracity that remains in tact this way.

One might expect the art of an inmate to be violent or angry or creepy, but there’s definitely a sense of the peaceful and sublime presented in these pages, and while Ford’s images are wonderfully raw and meandering, this produces a level of detail and depth that seems to reveal new facets of his images every time you look at them. In his images, and the words that he writes to himself around the edges, he references religion, pop culture, and a lot of spirituality – but never anger or violence. They read like an endless effort to understand himself and his world, and there’s an absolute tranquility in that.

Perhaps the best summation of Ford’s artistic approach can be summed up in Ford’s own words, written into the edges of one of his works :

“Art may or may not be able to change the world, but it can still change the moment.”

And truthfully, it’s very well-done art, done with a great deal of honed skill that’s had pure, solid time to refine itself. Nothing about it says ‘prison art’ – but sometimes it takes an interesting history or a controversial label to grab the attention of someone who’d otherwise not pay it much attention otherwise. For now on, I’ll be telling people that I started painting when a cyclops stole my wallet on the moon, and I needed cash to get back home.

The collection is introduced by a hand-written letter from Ford, and a brief forward by Drake. The afterword includes instructions for sending donations of books or magazines to Ford in prison, as well as everything that cannot be sent to him.

‘Isolated Art’ is a really cool addition to my whole ‘outsider art’ collection. I wonder if he’d take a commission for a Batman drawing.

It all starts, as many great things do, with a flea market.

Hiding amid a large collection of LPs. 8-tracks and 45s was a crate full of drawings. They depicted imaginary album covers, meticulously drawn by hand, completely realized with titles and track listings, and inside these hand-drawn album covers were imaginary records – drawn on cardboard, grooves and all. The artist had created the whole imaginary package – but why? And when?

The only identifying marks on these artworks were a musician’s never-used-in-public stage name, Mingering Mike, and a general area of origin. They told a complex story of a prolific musician with a diverse recording history – only he didn’t actually exist. Using Batman-like detective skills, and some personal correspondences that happened to be slipped in with the records, the man who found this unusual collection of drawings eventually tracked down the original artist, whose reply was simply, “You found my babies?”

The drawings were returned to Mingering Mike, though the collection remained incomplete, as Mike has recovered only about 25% of what he’d created as a teenager – dreaming of being a soul musician in the late 60s, drawing album covers, and even recording a few acapella performances on a reel-to-reel tape recorder with friends and relatives. Mike had his album covers (as well as a large collection of actual albums) taken from him after a management change at a storage space where he was keeping them, and the whole lot went to auction. Presumably, they were split up after this point, and three quarters of Mike’s collection remains out there, untraceable. So, what I’m saying to you collectors is to keep an eye out – there are probably some original Mingering Mike artworks out there still.

No monetary value has been assigned to these ‘records’, despite Mike’s cult following, because every known Mingering Mike record has been returned to the original artist, whose reaction to their discovery speaks volumes about their personal value. I’d like to think that anyone who discovers a Mingering Mike album and knows what it is would give Mike his record back without seeking personal gain, glad in their own role in the Mingering Mike legacy.

Of course, Mike has chosen to remain largely anonymous, much in the tradition of Leon Redbone, Jandek and The Residents. What we do know is that he’s not interested in allowing his minor stardom to endanger his employment, he values his privacy, and most current images of him put him behind sunglasses or some other disguising element. Contact can be made through Dori Hadar, the discoverer of these artworks, and the author of ‘Mingering Mike : The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar‘, which tells this story in full.

Last month saw the release of Mike’s first full-length album, 40 years after the aspirations began. At the moment, it’s only been released as a download on eMusic (to which I belong, fortunately), and it’s composed entirely of the reel-to-reel recordings that he did back in the 60s, unedited and raw. There’s no instrumentation involved – just tapping and voices, and even with the occasional car horn in the background or bump into the microphone. The ten-minute ode to Coffee Cake, and the exceptionally melodic ‘But All I Can Do Is Cry’ (which he wrote when he was drafted into Vietnam) – it all expresses a completely do-it-yourself attitude towards music and recording, and a natural aptitude for the music that he loved.

Mike completists should note that a hand-numbered 45 with Mike’s artwork and a recording of ‘There’s Nothing Wrong With You Baby‘ (which is also included in the eMusic album) has been released and can be found at Mike’s new website for a scant $9.50. The rest of the collection is out there, somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

Around seven years ago, my family gave me the gift of art. Unlike most twenty-somethings, I wanted real art on my walls – something actually produced by the hands of a human, not a print. At the time I owned a variety of works, some genuinely old and valuable, but others of the ’starving artist travelling sale’ genre. The art from my parents was mostly of the latter, but one was a bit different. Unframed, sloppily painted on a piece of Masonite, was a winter scene. The story goes that my great-uncle bought it directly from the artist some years before while travelling, and gifted it to my parents some time later. I’d never seen the painting before, which showed my parent’s take on the painting, but I accepted it and planned on getting it framed. Because it was an odd size, large but poorly proportioned, I risked spending lots at a professional framer, so it was put in storage.

Some years later I was browsing a junk store in Wisconsin, when I found something strikingly familiar: two sloppy unframed paintings on Masonite, quite obviously by the same artist. I wasn’t 100-percent sure, but the price was right, so I took them home with me.

According to the family rule, three of anything constitutes a collection. Not wanting to seem an ignorant collector, I decided to find out something about the painter. Two of the paintings were signed “Pletan,” and thanks to Google I found out where my art came from.

ExpressoTILT! has what appears to be the only article on the internet pertaining to the artist, but thankfully it’s quite complete. Burnette G Pletan was, according to the article, the “Fastest Painter In The World,” producing thousands and thousands of works of art in his lifetime. Here, I managed to own three of them, and given the scale of his portfolio, it’s quite surprising not to find more about him online. Burnette took up painting as a career simply because he knew he could do it. Without official training or artistic background, his works could be called folk or outsider art.

“Outsider Art” is a term generically used to describe untrained artists creating works based on their own creativity, and in earlier times was attributed to art created by the mentally ill. Today, it’s mostly used as a hipster term to describe anything on the fringes of the artistic community by untrained artists, but it still bears the stigma, based on the term ‘outsider’, of being excluded from the genuine art community. It also often crosses the lines of ‘folk art,’ a style generally culturally-driven and created by untrained small-scale artisans. Pletan, for example, could fall into either category: his art depicts rural scenes, much like a lot of folk art, but his expressive, ultra-fast style of painting and unique media puts his work more towards ‘outsider art’.

The biggest advantage to an art collector is the price: outsider art is generally cheap to come by. Challenging Pletan’s claims of high art volume, Steve Keene considers himself America’s most prolific artist, producing hundreds of paintings in a sitting. On his website, for $12, anyone can purchase one of his works (provided they don’t care what the painting’s subject matter is). While Keene is moving towards the center of the art world, leaving the fringes via exhibitions and media exposure, many “street artists” in large cities sell their art for enough to get by. eBay’s outsider art category is full of artistic hopefuls, many of which appear to be painted deliberately outsidery by trained artists, but as with any eBay shopping excursion careful examination will yield a modern treasure.

Because ‘outsider art’ is primarily a description of the artist rather than the style of art, the variety to choose from is quite large. Due to the lack of refined training much does appear ’sloppy’, but much of modern art today, such as Pollack, emphasises the emotion of the work over realism. The lack of training also reduces the use of artistic metaphors, which makes outsider art much more appealing to the general public.

As a collectible, the volume and price of outsider art available allows most anybody to start and maintain a sizeable and varied collection. As with any collections, the cardinal rule applies: collect what you enjoy. Because of its uniqueness, outsider art begs to be displayed, so be sure you’re willing to look at the work on a daily basis. Since outsider art is rarely found in mainstream outlets, much of the fun is in finding it by frequenting ‘art in the park’ sales, flea markets, or street vendors. As with mainstream art, there’s no guarante that any particular artist will become more valuable than the others, but for the price there’s minimal risk in overspending. A Pletan painting recently sold on eBay for just under $100, and an independent seller is asking for over $2,000 for a particularly nice Pletan painting. While Steve Keene’s paintings aren’t particularly rare, the attention his work is geting will no doubt increase the value of his works as time goes on. Consider also Grandma Moses, who, in her seventies, took up painting because arthritis interfered with her needlework, and over time her works because quite valuable, earning her awards and accolades. Beyond these examples are a wide variety of artists,drawing on nothing more than their own imagination to create beautiful and interesting works of art – far more accessible than the works exhibited in galleries, but in my opinion, definitely better than the prints and posters hanging in most homes. Jump into the unknown, and find some outsider art; at the very least, knowing where the painting came from is worth the price.