Outsider art is work produced outside the mainstream of modern art by self-taught visionaries, spiritualists, eccentrics, recluses, psychiatric patients, criminals and others beyond the perceived margins of society. Coined in 1972 the term is derived from art brut', which the artist Jean Dubuffet began promoting just after the Second World War. Both focus on the idea of a raw', untaught creativity, which is still a contentious and much-debated issue. Is this a natural phenomenon, requiring only the right circumstances (isolation or alienation) to be revealed; or is it more like a mirage projected by the very culture it is supposed to be escaping from? Behind the polemic and the commercial hype lies a cluster of assumptions about creative drives, the expression of inner worlds, radical originality and the artist's social or psychological eccentricity. Although Outsider art is often presented as a recent discovery, these ideas belong to a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance, when the modern image of the artist began to take shape. If Outsiders are in some way outside' the conventional art world, what happens to them, and to the works they create, when they are introduced to it? David Maclagan has been writing on Outsider art for over twenty-five years, and this book sets out to challenge many of the received ideas in the field. This book will be of interest to the growing number of people interested in the field of Outsider art, and all those studying concepts of artistic creativity and their cultural background.

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An introduction to the field of psychological aesthetics for art educators, art therapists, psychoanalysts, artists and art lovers, this book re-evaluates conventional philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to aesthetic qualities themselves, to the kinds of psychological significance they can generate, and to the interweaving of inner and outer realities upon which this depends. Art history tends to see an artist's work in the context of their life and times; psychoanalysis and art therapy tend to see art works in terms of an `unconscious' meaning that is beneath the surface of its `aesthetic' properties, within the context of the therapeutic relationship. Maclagan draws attention to the intimate connections between the aesthetic qualities of an art work per se, felt out in its material handling, be they attractive, disconcerting or just bland, and a wide range of psychological meanings. Drawing on phenomenology and archetypal psychology, as well as on neglected writers on unconcious aspects of form, Psychological Aesthetics: Painting, Feeling and Making Sense explores this realm of feeling, the different ways in which it is embodied in art and how we can use `subjective' strategies to articulate it in words. It will open new perspectives in understanding both the processes of art making and our creative response to its results.

Line Let Loose is a sustained investigation of the evolution of scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing. Of these three forms of 'drawing', scribbling is the most basic: it is seen as playing a formative role in the drawings of both children and primates. Doodling, whilst still being a widespread phenomenon, is largely an adult preoccupation, a nomadic form of drawing typically produced during meetings of phone calls. Automatic drawing, on the other hand, even though those who engage in it are not necessarily trained artists, is a more dramatic event: the results of an absent-minded or trance-like state are sometimes astonishing. All three forms of drawing have, because of their amateur and spontaneous character, been adopted by modern artists seeking to escape from the constraints of their professional skills. David Maclagan shows that each of these marginal forms of drawing has its own history, which includes Spiritualism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Psychedelic Art. Referring to Klee, Pollock, Miro, Twombly and Sol Lewitt, as well as many lesser-known or anonymous artists, he traces the links between them and a pervasive notion of the spontaneous and 'unconscious' creation of forms in art. He suggests that the original novelty of these unconventional drawing processes has begun to wear off, and he explores their new situation in our modern digital culture.