Folk Art and Pure Creative Expression

I'm not shy about my opinions regarding display-level miniature painting. I think it is wonderful if this style brings you joy, and I understand the appeal of spending dozens of hours on one project, slowly solving all the pieces of the puzzle until you get something very refined. However, I've always championed a style that is more crude, quick, and, in my opinion, has a more dynamic character.

Over the past couple of days, I've been digging into the work of American Folk artists. As an art teacher, I hadn't held them in particularly high regard, having been trained to see the "true" artists we learned about in Art History class.

It started when I saw a YouTube video about Coulter Jacobs by a channel called Monster Children. I started thinking about him and how he would abstract traditional tattoo designs (already rooted in Folk Art) into something unique that combined these elements with a crude, outsider-ness.

When we think of artists, we likely think of the "greats"—Monet, van Gogh, Picasso, Warhol—all artists we learned about in elementary school, and whose names are frequently mentioned. However, these artists have styles rooted in rebellion, crudeness, and experimentation that gets forgotten over time as they become household names.

So why do we hold ourselves to such unnatural standards when creating? Why not embrace the inner child, turn off the brain, and just make? Why do our goals as creators often aim to render something to a photographic level or be as realistic as a Bernini sculpture, when most of the artists we admire actively worked against that?

This is why Folk Art has been inspiring me so much lately. Artists in this category often have no formal training and operate outside the Eurocentric, perfection-driven art world. They create for the sake of creating and for fun, and their output is often extraordinary. In turn, their styles develop and their voices become more pronounced through their work.

As creatives, we need to shed this need for perfection and embrace the chaos that comes with child-like play.

I'm reading The Little Prince to my daughter (she can't understand it, but it's entertaining for me!), and a quote sticks out:

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them”

Here are a couple videos about folk artists that have influenced me:

'Make' Outsider Art Documentary

COULTER JACOBS

Outsider Art from The Inside

Have fun, get messy, let loose, nothing really matters!

TR 

xoxo