philamuseum:

Great and Mighty Artist of the Day:

John Serl
Born Olean, New York, 1894; died Lake Elsinore, California, 1993

Raised in a family of vaudevillians from Upstate New York, Serl moved to California and worked as a voiceover actor for film. Many of his large-scale oil paintings draw from his childhood experiences as a performer.

Learn more about Serl and the 26 other artists in “Great and Mighty Things”: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection

mucholderthen:

ART IN THE ROUGH
Art Brut - called Outsider Art in English - is art created in the rough [brut] by artists who are still raw [brut], artists who haven’t been processed through formal training, who live outside the culture of galleries and museums. Although this term is often applied to visionary artists and mystics, originally it referred to artists who were well outside established mainstream art, many being profoundly mentally ill.
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Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930), confined to a psychiatric hospital for most of his adult life was one of the first artists associated with the Art Brut tag.

Physically and sexually abused as a child, Wölfli  was orphaned at the age of ten and raised in a series of foster homes. He worked as a farm laborer until he was arrested and later committed to a psychiatric hospital.  (He was diagnosed with schizophrenia.)  Some time after being admitted, Wölfli began making art, and music …  

His doctor published a monograph about Wölfli and his art in 1921.  In 1945, Jean Dubuffet, artist and founder of Art Brut, “discovered” Wölfli.  1921 … 1945: this, I think, is what it means to be an “outsider.”

Surrealist painter Andre Breton, considered Wölfli’s body of work ” one of the three or four most important works of the twentieth century.”

(For more, check out Madness and Art and Wikipedia.)