A VANCOUVER-BASED RESEARCHER LOOKS FOR HER COUNTRY’S OUTSIDER ARTISTS

Having studied law, Vancouver-based Linda Rainaldi for many years worked in the field of legal publishing before turning her attention to art. As she explains here, she became interested in outsider art after learning about this genre and the artists whose creations have been tagged with its label. Then she set out to find evidence of the outsider-art phenomenon in her native Canada, where it is still a relatively new field of study, collecting, and art commerce.

She has written a manuscript, titled “Canadian Outsider Art — What Else Can Art Be Like?”, which she is aiming to publish in book form. Here, she shares with brutjournal her observations about the Canadian self-taught artist Menno Krant, whose work she describes in her manuscript.

Linda Rainaldi reports:

VANCOUVER, CANADA — Outsider art is not celebrated in Canada. I stumbled upon the term many years ago, while thumbing through a book about fantasy art environments. I realized that there must have been a significant number of unacknowledged outsider artists living in Canada, but in this country the outsider-art genre had never been seriously examined. So I set out on what would become a 15-year-long journey to find and meet such artists, and to explore the Canadian perspective on outsider art.