Customer Reviews

The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art

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The Colorful Apocalype is an excellent book that offers a unique blend of cultural history and theory, travel writing, and autobiography. It is also a very human and touching portrait of Southerners using art and religion to make sense of their pasts. The author's own past dealing with mental illness gives him a unique perspective and keeps him from harshly judging others because he too has been close to "crazy." A very literary book filled with dazzling writing and insight into religious obsession and psychology that would be classified as outside the norm.

Once again, Bottoms turns his incisive gaze onto the topics of madness and creativity. With this wonderful nonfiction look at the work of several outsider artists, Bottoms again shows us how art can save our lives, all of us. A masterful work.

In this book, the author recounts a physical and psychological journey. He travels to meet several visionary artists or those close to them. His adventure is an attempt to understand the life of his brother, who struggled with mental illness and said he experienced visions. Are all visionaries mentally ill? Are they, in fact, in touch with a higher reality? As an agnostic, the author struggles with these questions.

His training as an academic puts him in the position of judging the work of others in a supposedly unbiased way. What he doesn't explicitly state is that this training tends to disparage any type of religious experience. Although the author does not make a judgment about the validity of these artists' experiences, he is strangely drawn to them. This book is a sincere effort by someone trying to truly understand the life and art of those who are outside of the mainstream.

Greg Bottoms's project here is to figure out how the mental, physical, and familial truams of the outsider artists he examines is connected to their violent, apocalpytic, and death-haunted outsider art. What explains their passion and compulsion for creating their visionary and charismatic art? This links to his own past: Bottom had a violently schizophrenic brother who claimed to have religious visions and tried to kill himself. What distinguishes the visions and disturbing art of these outsider artists from the madness of schizophrenia and other disorders? The book is at its best (and really quite brilliant and revelatory) when Bottoms analyzes the psychology of these artists, his simultaneous connection to and detachment from them, and the impulse that drives them to make their art.

First of all, this is not what I expected when I ordered it. I thought it would be a book OF art, and it is a book ABOUT four artists - Howard Finster, William Thomas Thompson, Norbert Nox, and Myrtice West. All four are "evangelical artists," who believe they have been grabbed by God and commended to paint. Professor Bottoms, who had a schizophrenic brother, is exploring the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy. In his mind, they are struggling to make sense, through religion and art, of their difficult personal histories, to get past the "chaos of despair" and find ways in which "creativity can help order our lives."

This approach is both the book's greatest strength and greatest weakness.

Because the author is neutral on religion, he can critique without bering excessively "pro" or "anti." He is best when showing how the artists, coming from an extreme fundamentalism, are actually painting critiques of that very fundamentalism. He points out a major difference between these artists and his mentally ill brother: "... by contemporary psychological standards, he [West] probably was somewhat mad, but, as far as I could tell, he was not tortured or in pain in the least. He was a lot happier than most people I know ..." [p.54]

However, being that neutral also leaves him without a real conclusion other than the "revelations" the people have help them make sense of their world. Well-and-good, but that can be said of almost anyone, and is hardly what makes them unique. Statements such as "... I believe painting for West is like praying, a kind of concentrated ritual meant to show total devotion and thus bring about positive change ..." [p.47] is hardly unique to Ms. West, as many of us who "are religious" have such "concentrated rituals." For some, for example, attending Eucharist does this, and that is hardly a work of "outsider art," except, I suppose, in the sense we are to be in the world but not of it.

The Colorful Apocalypse is a great travel memoir that explores the pyschology and creativity of 'religious outsider artists' with a unique and sensitive perspective. It's a truly fascinating read.

The Colorful Apocalypse by Gregory Bottoms purports to be an insiders view of the Visionary Outsider Art of Norbert Kox, Howard Finster and William Thomas Thompson.

Promotional material from University of Chicago Press calls the book a "masterly chronicle" that weaves "a true narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.'

The book is a less than enthralling travelogue, and if it is a revealing biographical portrait, it, it is a portrait of the fuzzy and distorted lens through which Mr. Bottoms views Visionary artists and the world. Worse, Bottoms has the audacity to attempt to dismantle the reputation and life-work of artists not motivated by ego or economic gain, but by their calling and spiritual vision.

As an artist, I am familiar with the work of all three artists, but I am most familiar with the art and journals of William Thomas Thompson. The book is replete with inaccuracies about Thompson who is portrayed as an unstable, right-wing fundamentalist, given to cursing and racist remarks; a portrayal that is totally divorced from truth. However, most important, Bottoms distorts and misinterprets the spiritual vision that caused Thompson to commit his life to painting!

[...]

At a time when there is so much outrage about the "artistic license" taken by author James Frey in his partially fabricated memoir, A Million Little Pieces; the fact is that Frey was writing about himself! He was not pretending to document the life or the life-work of someone else.

I would encourage those interested in Outsider or Visionary Art or the work of Norbert Kox, William Thomas Thompson and Howard Finster to research the artists themselves, until a factual book is written.