Baby Tiger Being Born

I got distracted exploring the Highlands on Google street view! So I picked up my book on the artist Thornton Dial to sketch from.

This is from "Baby Tiger Being Born into the World: He Don't Know What's Going On but He's Going to Find Out." 1989-90, made in oil, burlap, and industrial sealing compound on wood.

Perhaps I should reserve comment because I've only read a little of the book (I think it goes into this issue in detail...), but it strikes me as odd that he's ever described as an "outsider artist". It might be a descriptive term rather than a dismissive one - if you have an unequal society it's a fact that you have "subaltern voices", but I certainly wouldn't want my voice to be described that way.

It reminds me of the view that "women can't be artists", which is fortunately (or rather hard-won-ly) not so popular in the UK now. Absolutely true if in order to be an artist a person's work has to be informed by and respond to a family tree of art that most people are excluded from knowing in detail.

Might be better to punch up and call formally trained or informally mentored artists "insider artists", but that just sounds chippy!

Anyway, his art is resourceful, purposeful, intriguing, considered, meaningful and emotive - I'm going to stake those adjectives down! It's quite a few!