The term “outsider art” wasn’t mentioned to me until I moved to a major metropolitan city acclaimed for many reasons, but chief among them formal arts education and opportunity. I came to understand that an “outsider” artist is usually self-taught and guided not by close study of technique or art histories but by an impulse so overwhelming it can only find peace with ingenuity. These impulses might be informed by intuitions or desires, they might be consolations or imaginative visions based in daydream, they might be described as ‘pure’ or ‘primitive’ when marketed at fairs. I felt skeptical of the delineation made with this term upon learning it, I felt protective too of those deemed “outsider” – were they not just artists, perhaps more eccentric in their approach or use of what would constitute a proper medium for making? Jean Dubuffet is credited with popularizing “art brut” (raw art) as an earlier term for “outsider” art. “These works are created from solitude...where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere. Because of these very facts, it is more precious than the productions of professionals. We cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.” It is a high indictment, yet one I don’t entirely disagree with. Sybil Gibson falls under the header of “outsider” artist to many critics. Born 1908 in Dora, Alabama, a rural coal mining town, her ambitions were laid out before her as schoolteacher. She faithfully saw to this, studying Elementary Education at Jacksonville State Teachers College, where a professor would tell her she simply did not have the talent to be an artist. In the three decades following this interaction she did not paint and fought near impoverishment supporting a family of her own. At 55, on Thanksgiving Day, what would have been a school holiday, and respite from generating income, she tempera painted images of flora and fauna on brown paper grocery bags for homemade wrapping paper. This practice evolved to her soaking cardboard and newsprint, painting these surfaces while they dried to soften primary colors. The newsprint, still transparent in most finished works, became an identifiable underpainting of Gibson’s. She rendered woman, child, landscape, or animal as ethereal; they are figurative in the classical sense yet closer to the effect of calligraphy, flowing and forgiving of stroke breaks. Gibson’s personal history, much like her art, is difficult to place. She was prone to disappearing for long stretches of time, leaving no word of her whereabouts to family or gallerists. On one occasion she left her artworks strewn about her front yard, discarding them either in catharsis or duress. By the early 1970s she relocated to Florida and had her first solo exhibition at the Miami Museum of Modern Art. The attention proved disorienting and she did not celebrate or arrive to her opening as directors had hoped. She reunited with her only daughter at the end of her life, after years in an assisted living facility blind and diabetic. Operations to restore her sight provided comfort, and one hopes she found that the extinction of her personality or creative output was ill-conceived. A great artist steers highest liveliness finding form. She allays doubt, if only for an afternoon, so this highest liveliness might be set free, gloriously resisting all that others say it is not.
-Katie Calderon