Outsider artists live on the margins of the art community, but they are not failed insiders or "wannabes". They are determined individualists, who paint with passionate intensity and honesty about the world they know, and they care nothing for the commercial art market and gallery system. Author Michael Richards explores Outsider Art through the work and philosophy of an extraordinary Australian painter, George Morant, a self-taught artist who began painting while mining opal at Lightning Ridge in outback New South Wales in the 1960s.
Since then Morant has created hundreds of typically big bold bravura compositions and held almost twenty solo exhibitions. Many of his most audacious and savagely satirical paintings are held in private and corporate collections around the world, and he is represented in the Australian National Gallery with a highly controversial work on the theme of Aboriginal deaths in custody.
This book presents a brief outline of the life and work of this enigmatic and reclusive artist, along with reproductions of some of Morant’s most iconic and iconoclastic paintings, and explains why Outsider Art and Outsiders are so important and what we learn from them.
