ELSEWHERE Issue 3, February 2016
The international journal of self-taught and outsider art
The international journal of self-taught and outsider art
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Paperback: $15.00 > $6.00 delivery anywhere in Australia From An Australian Tribe of One Roger Shelley The naive painter is a solitary primitive, a tribe of one. - George Melly, 1981 In his discerning way, George Melly introduces the phrase, "a tribe of one"* to sum up succinctly the position occupied by many "naive" or "primitive" artists in their societies when they are first discovered. Though they might be readily accepted by their communities on a social level, their art-making is an individual and solitary activity, which is often misunderstood by many in those same communities when revealed. In this article, I will address the life and practice of one such artist from Australia, Selby Warren (1887-1979). When he was discovered by the late Garth Dixon in 1971, Warren had been painting and drawing for most of his long life** though he had produced much more work after he semi-retired from a life of manual work in 1963. ...Like many artists, Warren simply needed to paint. This is something he seems not to have questioned and unlike most artists, it seemed that he did not paint for an audience or a market. He apparently accepted that his pictures would not be viewed or commented upon by others and he showed them to few people other than his immediate family. His granddaughter, Jessica recalls: "As far as I know, he painted because he found joy in it and liked that you could capture a moment in time with them and it is my belief this is what he liked about painting, the freedom of the way he expressed his memory of the past and day to day events."*** * George Melly, A Tribe of One: Great Naive Painters of the British Isles (Yeovil: Oxford Illustrated Press, 1981). Though Melly's work was written almost a decade after Roger Cardinal's Outsider Art (London: Studio Vista, London, 1971), the descriptor "outsider art" was not used widely to describe a type of art still then labelled "naive", "primitive", or "self-taught" by many in the artworld and almost all in the media in Australia ** Warren was 84 when Dixon first met him. He lived for another seven years, dying at the age of 91 in 1979 *** Email to the author dated 20 July 2014 forwarded by another of Warren's granddaughters, Teresa, on Jessica's behalf Specifications Format: Softcover, 96 pages Dimensions: 280mm (H) x 215mm (W) Publication date: February, 2016 Publisher: STOARC Publication city/country: Sydney, Australia |
Inside ELSEWHERE Issue 3
- Editorial - Colin Rhodes
- Lonnie Holley Interview with Bernard L. Herman at Whole Foods, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA (8 September 2013), following Holley's performances at the Hopscotch Music Festival (September 5-7, 2013) in Raleigh, North Carolina - Bernard L. Herman
- Vivam!: The Divine Intersexuality of Henry Darger's Vivian Girls - Leisa Rundquist
- A Self-Taught Knowledge System: Joe Minter's "African Village in America" as a Syncretic Epistemology - Laura Bickford
- Robert Prudhoe's Temple of 'Boingaology' - Chris James
- Reimagining the Machine: Autobiography and History in Charles Vermeulen's Farm Equipment Installation - Kenneth Scambray
ELSEWHERE Issue 3: preview
