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." 



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