Karim,
WHen you get a minute, please call me. I need a favour from you in this
regard.
Masoud. MQDT Haroun Darbo. Al Mu'Umin.
Life on the outside
Three decades in the making: Kevin Duffy's extraordinary labour of love
By Dan Bell
BBC News
For many in the art world their creations are little more than the daubings
of madmen. Their work has been bulldozed and vandalised, and one artist had
bricks thrown through his window. Mostly they are completely ignored. This is
the lot of the UK's outsider artists.
Outsider art is art that sits outside any known idiom. It is art created
from an entirely new language. It is not for sale. And it is marked by
obsession.
To some who are weary of the increasing commercialisation of art, outsider
works are unpolished jewels, and the people who make them are the purest
artists of all.
And hidden away on an old allotment near Wigan, a vast new creation has
recently come to light. Former Lancashire cotton mill worker Kevin Duffy, 62, has
poured his life's energy into creating a magical alternative reality.
Kevin Duffy, with a mannequin which, like most of his material, is donated
For over three decades he has used reclaimed building materials to transform
his allotment-turned-garden centre into a labyrinth of three-quarter-size
Tudor-style cottages, rendered pillars and curved walls.
On Boxing Day 13 years ago, his wife fell dead beneath the Christmas tree,
and Duffy's work took on a dramatic new urgency. Since then the site has
erupted with more than 80 buildings and sculptures.
He doesn't use scaffolding because it slows him down. He says he will never
stop building and he expects to die with the work still in progress.
Those who think outsider artworks are the daubings of the insane have a
point - outsider art was first recognised in the early 19th Century among the
inmates of asylums.
In 1948, the artist Jean Dubuffet began to collect these obsessive, surreal
and powerful works made by people who not only had never been to an art
gallery, but barely knew what one was.
Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut to describe his collection. It translates
as raw art - as in uncooked by culture or aesthetics, and like a nerve. This
is outsider art.
But is it art?
No-one knows how many of these pockets of creative obsession are scattered
across the country, but there are at least a dozen, and they have often
evolved over decades.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/magazine_enl_1193397489/html/1.stm)
Details from Duffy's work
_Enlarge Image_
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/magazine_enl_1193397489/html/1.stm)
• In Guernsey, a French monk built a miniature chapel and encrusted its
entire surface with brightly coloured broken glass, shells and pottery
• In Northumberland, a strange menagerie sprung up out of concrete
• The setting for the TV series The Prisoner in Portmeirion, Wales, is an
artwork
• And in Suffolk there is a garden made of hub caps
But is it art? According to Iain Jackson, an architecture student who has
written about Duffy for Raw Vision magazine, the country's only publication
devoted to outsider art, Duffy's environment has both the deliberation and
ambiguity of a work of art.
"Like a lot of outsider environments, it's like a narrative or story," he
says.
"Kevin thinks about the perspectives and axis that are created by his
installations. He explained to me how he thinks of the foreground, middle and
distance, being careful to place structures at key moments to create a scene and
carefully composed arrangement."
Duffy says he wants his world to offer people an escape. Visitors to his
garden centre are encouraged to explore the artwork it is built around. "We're
trying to illusionise people, so it knocks them a bit dizzy because they don't
know where they are," he says.
Sudden death
"All I want them to do is to take them out of themselves. To come on, to
forget that they've got a mortgage, and they've got wife trouble, and the car's
broken down, and they go off in a different mood."
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/magazine_enl_1193398053/html/1.stm)
Outsider art in India
_Enlarge Image_
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/magazine_enl_1193398053/html/1.stm)
He knows all about the need to escape. When his wife died unexpectedly he
was devastated and he and his son Carl, 41, ploughed all their energy into the
work.
"Rather than just brood and stop in on a rainy day and put on the cricket,
we put on the dirty clothes," he says.
"It takes your mind off it, because you become obsessed when somebody dies.
You can't think of anything else because of the grief. Keep going till you
drop, that's the best way."
The Tudor era is his muse - the stately homes and gardens of nearby
Yorkshire helping fire his inspiration.
There is no organisation devoted to preserving these works and many have
been lost. One man spent 15 years encrusting his entire garden with sculptures
and sea shells, only to have it pulled down by his son with a JCB when he
died.
Duffy, who was known locally, only came to the attention of Raw Vision a few
months ago when he asked the council mark his creation as a place of local
interest. They refused but told him to contact the magazine.
Not for sale
John Maizels, editor of Raw Vision, is heartbroken when they are destroyed.
"It's really upsetting because it's gone forever," he says.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/magazine_enl_1193397254/html/1.stm)
LA outsider artist Simon Rodia
_Enlarge Image_
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/magazine_enl_1193397254/html/1.stm)
From a small clapperboard house near Watford, the magazine traces outsider
artists from across the world. Its walls are lined with brightly-coloured
books and magazines, each one a window into an alternative reality.
"It is not affected in any way," says Maizels. "It's not for sale and most
of it isn't even done to be exhibited."
"When I came across it I was just so amazed by it, it was so powerful and it
had such strong personal meaning... people are revealing themselves, their
demons, their own aspirations, their own inner feelings.
"When you get to go into them and walk around, you're right inside someone's
creative world and it's an extraordinary experience.
"They don't go to exhibitions or private views, they just work. They've got
an inner compulsion."
Duffy says he has created 15 "sculptures" in the last year alone. "I can't
help it," he says. "I do it all the time, every day, even when I'm ill."
Will it ever be done?
"No, no. I'll die and there'll be a building half done. It'll never be
finished. It can't be finished."
************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html
To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
|