by Zoë Pollock
Greg Bottoms remembers North Carolina's outsider artist James Harold Jennings, who killed himself in 1999:
James lived by himself in the farmhouse, which had no indoor plumbing, electricity, or telephone. He rose with the sun and retired with the dusk. He believed in the logic and cycles of nature. If you were in tune with them, they taught you how to live and behave; you live like an animal, which, of course, is what you are. He later began to call himself the “Artist of the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.” …
Like almost every outsider artist you could name, he obsessively reconfigured a finite series of images and motifs from his immediate outer and inner worlds. And like almost every outsider artist you could name, he did not “evolve” much technically or aesthetically. He found a way to express what he needed, psychologically, to express. Then he did it over and over and over again. Outsider artists don’t often get “better,” in the way we might define that in academia or curatorial culture; they get more.
This anecdote made me smile:
He could afford a six-pack of Miller every day and have his favorite lunch: A “Miller sandwich,” two Millers with one in between.
I loved Bottoms' The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art when I read it a couple of years ago.
The Dish 