Er... God, I don't even know if I can answer it any more. What is Outsider Art? Erm... Basically, Outsider Art is... No, I can't... Start again. What is Outsider Art? I don't know, you got me. I been trying to figure that out. I've certainly been called worse things in my life than an Outsider Artist. Is that somebody that's working outside? You know, that doesn't mind if it rains or something, and they'll draw outside? That's what I would've said. In fact, I was a bit of an Outsider Artist. I was over on a bench over in Hyde Park, laying low from the cops at night, doing drawings! What do you mean? Well, I suppose so, but what does an outsider...? What does an insider feel like? How are you saying the name? Outsider Art. Ah, Outsider? I don't know. Maybe is from a different planet? Represent for me Outsider. Whatever you call it, when you see it, you know it. You're looking for things that make you go, "Oh, my God." And that's Outsider Art. Once upon a time, in the Italian countryside not far from Venice, there lived a young boy named Carlo Zinelli. Carlo's mother died when he was very young and he was taken out of school to go and work in the fields, tending to his father's cattle. When he grew into a young man he joined the army and was sent off to fight in a terrible war. But he returned after just two months, and anyone who knew Carlo could tell that something was very wrong with him. He behaved strangely, and refused to utter a single word. They tried to cure him with electricity, but that didn't work, and so he was sent away to an asylum with high walls and locks on the doors. And there he would stay, hidden from the world. One day Carlo picked up a stone from the ground and began to draw on the walls. The nurses stopped him immediately, but Carlo couldn't stop. He wanted to draw everywhere, on anything. After a while the doctors realised it kept him quiet, and so they gave him some broken old pencils and left him to it. Then one day, a Scottish artist called Michael Noble arrived. He was married to a rich Italian contessa and had come to the hospital to cure his fondness for whisky. He saw what Carlo was doing with primitive equipment, and was outraged. "This man is an artist! You must let him create!" And so, with the contessa's money, Michael Noble created a studio inside the asylum, with good brushes and plenty of paint. Carlo Zinelli may have been unable to talk, but something else poured out of him. The floodgates opened. Carlo spent eight hours painting every day, completely engrossed in his work. By the time he died, he had made nearly 2,000 paintings. These works were once dismissed as the scrawlings of a lunatic. Now Carlo Zinelli's work is on show 70 miles from the asylum, at the biggest and most prestigious event in the art calendar. It's early summer and the Venice Biennale is just beginning. This festival is a barometer for the contemporary art world, it reflects currents trends. And, this year, so-called Outsider Artists like Carlo Zinelli are the hot topic. ..and Carlo became very prolific and he started doing more and more work. His psychiatrist then took his art to see Jean Dubuffet and Andre Breton... Carlo's work is here in Venice thanks to this man - the director of the Museum Of Everything. The crosses there upside-down must be the graves of the soldiers and that star is the star of the Alpini soldiers, which he was conscripted in. You see that star everywhere. I think there are all kinds of riddles hidden in there, but I think they are just for him. From what I know, he didn't care. The minute he finished one, he sort of threw it away and the nurses and doctors would grab them up and a lot of them would make their way into their homes. But what happened to this work in the interim? Generally speaking, Carlo has been curated by and for the Outsider Art Brut audience, and that's why it's stayed this sort of...secret, I guess. Well, that secret is now well and truly out. The keynote exhibition here is the Encyclopaedic Palace, where self-taught artists rub shoulders with big names from the contemporary art world. Have a look at these. They were made by a 38-year-old man with absolutely no artistic training. This man saw visions and heard voices. In private, he induced hallucinations and then recorded everything in small journals, a process he kept up for 16 years. That man was Carl Jung, one of the founding fathers of modern psychology. Is he an Outsider Artist? I don't like to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, and that's what this exhibition is about. I've learned, particularly from artists, that artists are curious about any visual manifestations, and so I wanted to make a show for artists and for the public in which the distinctions between the professional and the self-taught are blurred. What this Biennale does is disrupt the story of art as most of us know it. It brings us back to the most basic questions about the power and the purpose of art. What if there is this inborn urge to be an artist? Inborn in these guys that had no chance. The thing that I think we look for in art is a kind of urgency, like the artist could not help but do it. And what we have in contemporary art right now is a lot of calculation. - Careerism, calculation.
- The artist could... There's no sense of that urgency or necessity. It's fantastic to see here all these artists who were always marginalised until now and they're together with artists, and this is where they belong, obviously. And by the way, excuse me, Caravaggio was homeless, incarcerated and insane. And 90% of the artists I've ever met are kind of a little insane, so, boom. I just have to say I've never seen a Venice Biennale as strong as this one. I mean, for me, it's really... I think this is a turn in history here. It's a rupture. It's really very important. Some of the best work in Venice is by an Outsider Artist called Shinichi Sawada. The young man who made these strange and wonderful creatures works in almost total isolation at the top of a mountain in the backwoods of Japan. Sawada's magical and monstrous creatures seem to be the fruits of a personal mythology. His work has been shown in Venice, London, Paris, Amsterdam - an exhibition record that would be the envy of any Goldsmith's graduate his age. But, unlike those graduates, Sawada isn't engaged with the art world, the merry-go-round of dealers, openings and endless networking. His autism means he is unable to engage with it. Why does he make these things? It's not for profit. Certainly not for fame. Where does this urge to create come from? I like your... Oh, yeah! Japanese society expects everyone to plays a productive role, whatever condition they may have. Akane Kimura makes 0.8 yen, that's half a pence, for every sponge she puts in a plastic envelope. In the afternoon, she draws. And those pictures have been exhibited in museums across the world. THEY SPEAK JAPANESE This is Nobuji Higa. One day he was given a book of coffee table erotica. But he transforms those photographs into something altogether different. It was in the 1940s that a French artist called Jean Dubuffet first brought self-taught art out of the asylums, and into the galleries. Dubuffet christened it "Art Brut", a legacy of his days in the wine trade, where "brut" means raw or unsugared. He was interested in the lack of sophistication of the work, which he saw as its purity. For him, a spontaneous outpouring from the wellspring of creativity was the mark of TRUE art. Dubuffet toured asylums in central Europe, hoovering up work and creating an alternative canon of Art Brut. He discovered people like Aloise Corbaz, a Swiss governess whose imagined affair with Kaiser Wilhelm II led to an erotic outpouring of drawings, collage and murals. Or Adolf Wolfli, a schizophrenic goatherd and labourer who produced over 25,000 pages of drawings, literature and music in his own invented notation, all of which he signed "St Adolf II". Dubuffet often had problems finding art, because the hospitals rarely archived it. The psychiatric world didn't fully appreciate the value of what their patients were making. BIRDSONG But times have changed. BIRDSONG Here in the forest north of Vienna lies the Art / Brut Centre, Gugging. Gugging is famous for its House of Artists, home to 14 psychiatric patients who have been plucked from the Austrian system thanks to their artistic talent. Unlike the day centres of Japan, these artists live here full-time. There is no obligation for them to make art, but still it pours out of them. So you've brought the outsiders inside. How has the art world responded to that? In the '80s, it was very difficult because on the one hand the world of psychiatry didn't understand it, and on the other hand the art world saw this experiment. It was not really presented as art. So what I wanted to show was that all the single pieces of art, of every good Art Brut artist, has the same worth as any other single piece of any other kind of art. If you buy a Van Gogh, you have to pay 200 million, and then the illness doesn't play any role. So it's the art that's important, is what you're saying, and let's not focus on the case studies. But how do you look after the artists, then? One thing is the private life of an artist, and the other thing is his professional life as an artist. So on the one hand we supported the artist in their private needs, with illness or whatever. And on the other side we managed, more or less, the art - we organised exhibitions, we made publications, and we selected their works because they themselves couldn't select. It's the same work as any gallerist works his artists. Perhaps the best-known Gugging artist is the now deceased August Walla. It was almost as though his creative urges could not be contained within his room, and exploded into the surrounding countryside, which he peppered with his work on any available surface. The Vatican has the Sistine Chapel, and Gugging has August Walla's old room. INDISTINCT Come, I show you a picture. Look it. This is from... HE SPEAKS GERMAN It's a lot of money. I see we have these images of the artists on the walls here. The fact that you're selling and exhibiting this work, pretty successfully, what impact does that have on the artists? It depends on the artist. Johann Garber is very aware of who he is. I know, we went to Basel to an exhibition in a gallery there, and we had to fly with the airplane. And he asked me, "Nina, could you please carry my luggage?" And I said, "How come?" And he said, "Yeah, I'm the artist". SHE LAUGHS So in a way they're just like all these other famous artists, they're all divas? Yes. On one side, of course, yeah. Erm... So... And why not? LEONHARD: That's my picture. My picture. - That's my picture.
- That's my picture. JOHANN: We have place for 14 people, nothing more. That means I invite somebody if I see that he has a talent, but if he will become an artist is a question - you never know. It needs time. Sometimes it's very easy, sometimes it needs ten years, sometimes it never will be. You're a very patient man, Johann. It's... Life goes over 80 years, and not just for three months, you know? This is Gunther Shutzenhofer. He currently has a solo show at a gallery in New York. GUNTHER LAUGHS I love his work because it doesn't look like anything that I know, after doing this for 35 years. Was ist das, Gunther? This is a...a...a radio. Radio. This is a radio. Shutzenhofer's work seems to have that ability to transport diverse people in the same way that an inkblot test does. I've seen it over and over again. You look at something. "What is this image?" One person will say, "Oh, it's a radio." "It's a car." "It's an aeroplane." "It's a comb." "It's a..." And everyone is bringing their own brain to the work. And that's a wonderful thing. Everyone is desperately trying to put Outsider Art into a nice, neat little box. And it doesn't really fit in because it's something that happened independently. It's something that owes nothing to art history. When you owe nothing to art history, you really have a problem. This work, that was not made with that trapping of, you know, "Will I get into one of the good galleries? "Will I be in the Biennale?" It's very nice that it's there, it deserves a place in the Venice Biennale. But at the same time I don't want to be so much part of that whole, "Oh, what's the market doing?" Because then. you're like financial stocks. You should love it because it inspires you to love, not because people say "Oh, this is safe now to love, "because it's selling big, we can all get in on it..." What is that? I don't want that! Well... We had grand ambitions about ten years ago that we were going to try to create a whole category at Christie's of Outsider Art. Unfortunately, there weren't enough investor/speculator types who would be willing to fuel the market by reselling. That is one of the problems we had with creating an auction category. Many of the passionate Outsider Art collectors are in some ways as obsessive as the artist they collect. They love the works they have, and they keep them. - Aren't they beautiful?
- Yes, they are very beautiful. I've been collecting this group of cards for about 30 years, either if they came up in auction or from private collections or wherever. Madge Gill was controlled by a spirit guide, - who she named as Myrninerest.
- Myrninerest? Yes. "My inner rest". I would think that these are a repeated self-portrait, over and over again. There is an obsessive quality to many of these artists. Often - like the British outsider Madge Gill - they work in isolation. Where professional artists forge their creations in a dialogue with art history, the outsider is engaged in a monologue. One of the exciting things about seeing an Outsider Artist you've never seen before is that you've never seen anything like it before either. Because each Outsider Artist is like an art movement of one. They invent their own techniques, their own disciplines, their own ways of working and their own visions. That's why they come up with something completely individual each time. Now this is a little picture by Joe Coleman. It's a self-portrait of Joe, just after he'd carried out his autopsy on a dead body in a Hungarian hospital. That's him there - it's called The Pathologist. I couldn't afford his paintings - they're so expensive! Big paintings, about this big. So I said, "Joe, can you just do me a little tiny painting "that I can just about afford?" My little grandson is really frightened of it. Welcome to The Odditorium. OFFBEAT MUSIC PLAYS I got kicked out of art school. And then they asked me to be an adviser many years later, after I had a certain...following at that point. So I said, "OK, I'll be an adviser." So I told the kid, "Get the fuck out of school, "because you're not going to learn a goddamn thing in that school." You have to go out there and live, and that's where you're going to find your art, not in art school. At home it was really, pretty fucked up because, you know, my father was a pretty violent alcoholic, and he tormented my mother and the rest of the family. I found release and relief in drawing. When I started painting, my brushstrokes were bigger, and now I barely even move my brush. It's a one-hair brush and I use jeweller's lenses. I'm looking for more and more information on the surface of the painting. Even though it's coming out of somewhere - out there or in here - but it's appearing here, and that's where I'm finding it. And the more minute that I look, the more that I find. I try to take care of the misfits, and the losers. The losers never get to write their side of history. Except in my work. Joe Coleman's customers include Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio. Prices for his paintings have risen steadily, and there is now a waiting list. People want the work quicker than his one-hair brush can paint it. In fact, such is his popularity that, in a peculiar twist, he is now banned from showing at the Outsider Art Fair on account of being too successful. What does this tell us? Perhaps it suggests we fetishise these artists - we prefer them to be poor and struggling. Across town lives one such artist who fits that bill. Hi! Welcome to New York! Come in! Come in here. Yeah, now you can do. It's OK? When Ionel Talpazan was still a boy in Romania, he had an encounter with what he believes was a UFO, which bathed him in a strange blue light. His life's work is an attempt to make sense of this. Go ahead. Maybe you like it. ETHEREAL MUSIC PLAYS Ionel's parents sold him for just under Β£100 when he was a baby. As a young man he took drastic measures to escape the Ceausescu regime, and swam the Danube from Romania to Yugoslavia, eventually finding refuge in the United States. He has lived in this one-room apartment in Harlem for 18 years. It was at the Outsider Art Fair - I had a booth there, I used to show Outsiders' work there. But Ionel used to be outside, in the snow every day, selling his artwork on the street. So, in a way, Ionel shot himself in the foot because he was always outside selling his work for a fraction of the cost that I would like to have sold it for on my booth at the fair. HE INHALES DEEPLY Ionel may be ploughing a lonely furrow. But then again...they all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. They all laughed when Edison recorded sound. JAUNTY MUSIC PLAYS The Alternative Guide To The Universe is brimming with mavericks - self-taught artists, unlicensed architects, fringe physicists and visionary inventors. Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff treated me to a private tour as it was hung. ROBOT WHIRS AND CLANGS There's something about his movement that is quite scary, isn't it? Wu Yulu is a farmer in China who has taught himself how to make robots, using whatever materials are at hand. He's made robots who commit suicide, robots who smoke cigarettes, robots who do the dishes for him. And this is a child robot. ROBOT WHIRS AND CLANGS When you think about the idea of a child robot in China, given China's policy of only one child per family, who's going to be a sibling for all those single children? This is a remarkable French artist named Marcel Storr. These were all made in the 1970s. He was an orphan, he was deaf. He worked as a street sweeper in the Bois de Boulogne. He would go home at night and make these incredibly intricate drawings - these were cityscapes he called Megalopolises, and this was his blueprint for the rebuilding of Paris, which he was convinced was going to be destroyed in a nuclear attack. This was one of his last, unfinished works. It gives you a sense of how he worked, which is great. Incredibly detailed, painstaking, elaborate lines that he's drawing, where they're so small, I can't even see them with my eye any more. It's this idea also, in this art, if you can't live in the real world or you're not happy there, create an alternative reality for yourself. And that's what he seems to have done. Paul Laffoley is an inventor of all kinds of devices. But he was one of the assistant architects working on the original World Trade Center in New York, and at a certain point, he went off in a different direction. It's good to be unknown for a long time. Because then you can actually pump up what you're doing, and make it into a format where they can't destroy it. Because if you're in an art school - that's the worst place to go. That's the one thing I said to myself. Never enter an art school. I did go to an architectural school, but got kicked out after one year. For conceptual deviance. Paul came up with plans for a time machine where your body doesn't travel through time - you're just able to see what different times look like. Mentally, you can project yourself. I mean, Stephen Hawking said we'll see a time machine in the next 50 years. Laffoley says he had an encounter with an alien intelligence that changed his life. And that directed him to make this painting. And that if you put your hands... This is the left hand of the past, the right hand of the future. If you put your hands, Alan, on those two things, and put your head forward, you're supposed to be able to download intelligence from another dimension. You look different. I'll let you know. So this is a sort of injection of something... Also you could see it in Venice as well - a different way of looking at the world, a sort of mutation of art and science and mathematics, and mysticism... I think a lot of work in this show hearkens back to a kind of Renaissance moment, when science and art weren't so different. You think about Leonardo and Michelangelo, they were making weaponry, they were thinking about flight, they were thinking, you know, about science as well as thinking about art. They were all engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, and understanding what it meant to be human, which is something contemporary art has lost sight of. Supposedly now we have experts who look after that for all of us. All these people in this show are people who have decided they don't want the experts to look after it. They've got their own ideas about how this works. George Widener is the kind of person who will see a licence plate, it'll make him think of a date. It'll be Thursday, he'll then think of every event he's ever read or heard of that happened on a Thursday with that number date. And he's made landscapes, whole cities, based on these ideas of time. George believes in this idea called The Singularity, which is, that in the near future, machines will become intelligent, we'll have artificial intelligence. And a lot of people put this date at 2045, which now is starting to seem not that far away. I started to listen to this voice inside of me and stuff that was interested in these patterns. And it started to become very strong. You know, I was institutionalised at one point, because I was going over these things in my head over and over and over and over again. There's a thing called a magic square. These numbers, if you add them up this way, they add up to 34. If you add them up this way, they add up to 34, right? In all directions, they add up to an identical sum of 34. And in the case of this sculpture - there's 2, 17, 29, 11, 10, 5 and 13 add up to 70. And I create symmetrical patterns using the days of the week. And there's this linkage between the present, the past and the future. What happened in the past was... I was, you know, trying to do too much in my life, and I kind of got overwhelmed and went from being an engineering scholar to being on the streets and stuff. Now I'm in galleries, I associate with dealers, art dealers, I show at art fairs, I sell my work. You know, so, what to make of it? I don't know, you know? I don't think about it too much. If you were to look at the Fridays of 1912 - there's January 5, 12, 19, 26, February 2, 9, 16, 23, March 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, April 5, 12, 19, 26, May 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 and so on. So I see them in my head, they line up and stuff. I feel, um...that there will be huge technological changes in the future. Machines will be able to scan these very rapidly, and see these interconnections and find this sort of interesting. They're going to need artwork too, the robots and machines of the future. So I'm simply making some work, for them and stuff, to relax with, and stuff. I'm just being useful, I think. That's what I'm doing, you know. The Museum of Everything started life in a former dairy in 2009. It has an exceptional collection of Outsider Art, and just as revolutionary as the work is the way it's presented. With no fixed abode, it takes over spaces for a limited time only. The ramshackle, hand-knitted aesthetic is the work of Eve Stewart - the award winning production designer of Les Mis and The King's Speech. It's playful and unpretentious - a million miles from the intimidating white space of most contemporary galleries. Here it is again, popping up in London, in Selfridges. Who else would think to stage an art exhibition slap bang in the middle of Oxford Street? This man pops up everywhere too. The museum's freewheeling director, James Brett. Now, he is the ringmaster of a travelling circus as it hurtles across Russia, sniffing out secret works by unknown artists. This convoy has collected new work in four different Russian cities. And now it has come to a stop in Moscow, for a huge show of that work at Dasha Zhukova's Garage. This very graphic work is by Oleg Gordov, who is a street cleaner, and a handyman and he's a self-taught historian. And when you talk to him, actually, he was a really troublesome kid, and I think narrowly escaped being in prison. And he's a sweet character. But obviously, as you can see on this wall, there's a lot of Nazis. It's one thing to have one Hitler in your show - we've got two Hitlers. And that Hitler is what sort of sold me on him, because it's Hitler and he's just realised he's lost the war. And if you look at his features, you can see the pain. This one, which is again, you know, same period - it's a Russian soldier, seductively licking the cheek of a female Nazi officer. And there's something about the humour of the whole thing, that actually he's thrilled by these episodes of war. And somehow, nobody else was doing it like that. I certainly hope he's not a fascist. I can't really tell. I have a really complicated relationship with this artist. The first time I saw her work, I was very confident - "not for us, thanks very much." Because it's too...it's too simple in its depiction of the world. But this woman is far from simple and once I started looking at what she does... You happen to be pointing the camera at the ones that changed my mind. The artist, Pyzhova, she's about 80 years old. She's not skinny. And she lives in this apartment block and is very proud of what I think is 150 or so lovers that she's had during her lifetime. She's a very erotic woman. You haven't just got animals doing it with their own species, you've got animals doing it with other species. And then things get worse. This is not a one-off, or a two-off, there are hundreds of these pictures. It's not that these are masterpieces, but still... I'm in love with this picture. The two brontosauruses making out by the river is just phenomenal. And it probably happened. This artist, you've got to look at. I mean, just take a big look. This is a 15-year project of one man, who goes every day to the park, in Nizhny Novgorod, and paints the same, or virtually the same landscape. And what he's documenting, from the top of this to the bottom, is the weather. My only sadness is that we were only able to get a year of Viktor. I was hoping for five years. The whole of this museum in Moscow couldn't contain all 15 years. It took us six months to persuade him to allow us to show it here. Partly because he said, "Someone's going to call up and they'll need to know, "what was the weather, March 2010?" I said "No-one's going to call you up. "This is a great opportunity to communicate your life's work!" There are very few contemporary artists who would spend 15 years on one project. He didn't even make it to the opening of the exhibition because he was afraid that he would miss a day of doing this. I loved the word "outsider" at the beginning because, of course, I felt it associated with me and I can be weird, and I like that weirdness, I like my differences. But the more I looked into it, the more I thought, this just can't be correct. I realised that the mainstream museums were using it to segregate. The other big thing for me is not to present it as the work of a bunch of crazy people, I mean, if I'm really frank. That's often the assumption. So the other key issue is to say, "Look, who's crazy? "Who's disabled? Who's able?" Why do we think that if someone has a mental health issue, it's just a cut-and-dried thing? Everybody has a mental health issue, it's a question of degree. And once you start to understand that, I think you take a step back into creativity and our reasons for making. Why do we create? Picasso said that every child is an artist. The problem...is how to remain one, once we grow up. Welcome to Creative Growth Art Centre. Creative Growth Art Centre is a good place. Yeah, let's go do it! San Francisco has always been a crucible for radical ideas. So it's no surprise that it's home to Creative Growth. Every day, more than a 100 people that society calls disabled come here...to make art. The notion was by the founders originally, Elias Katz and his wife Florence, that there's an innate creative impulse in all humans, and given encouragement and materials, that will come out. Dan Miller was the first Creative Growth artist to have his work bought by New York's Museum of Modern Art. For me, when I watch Dan work, you see a kind of anxiety and frustration. Almost as if everything he needs to say is in his head and he's just really struggling with getting it out. For most of us who are speech-enabled we would talk it out, and Dan doesn't seem to be able to, so he needs to draw it out, and really hope that someone will understand, will get the translation, will get the urgency of his message. I love the atmosphere of this place. You can walk in off the street and just talk to the artists, buy a piece of work. Or a limited edition comic book. Or even a T-shirt. Now brown is the colour of chocolate Which we all know and love Taste that chocolate and you cannot tell If it's made from Hershey Ghirardelli, or Dove For in that tasty chocolate delight There is no black There is no white. All DJ Disco Duck - that's me. The All-Star Chocolate Heroes. You've created a whole new universe here. - Oh, yes.
- Where did the All Star Chocolate Heroes come from? Well, it all just came from my head when I decided to have some superheroes of my own. The comic book right here is going to help me start my own business in entertainment. And a lot of people, whether they're my family or friends, are real proud of me of working real hard on this one. "Time to get busy up in here." - "This is their crib." Their crib is where they live, I take it?
- Yeah. Green Nose - he's a type of arch-enemy who hates everything to do with chocolate. He doesn't even like to drink hot chocolate because he thinks that chocolate is no fun, but that's not really true - chocolate can be fun. "Now that you've captured Green Nose, "let's head down to Mel's for a chocolate shake." Yes. That was their reward for capturing Green Nose. Oh, here they are having their chocolate shake. I dedicate this one to all the ladies who have pretty feet, and for many guys who appreciate women's pretty feet. They can express how they feel, like I have. They can say nice things about a woman's pretty feet in a sweet, positive, civilised manner, like I have. You can't quite see their feet. Well, I can. Because I have good vision. Here's where the feet are at. Right now, I'm dealing with hair loss, but I'll have a plan to get my hair back. - You've got a plan, eh?
- Mm-hm. - Let me know about it.
- Oh, yes. Once upon a time, in a rough part of San Francisco, there lived a boy called William. He was different to the other kids... ..and they would tease him at school. He would walk home and try to ignore the drunk men shouting in his street. Sometimes he heard gunshots outside his window. He wished they would go away. Then, one day, he came here and began to draw. He drew the people who had been shot, back to life. He drew his city, but the way he wanted it to be. And he drew beautiful and strong women he'd never met. Yeah, look what I drew right here. See what I drew here, it's a Lone Language, it's a Queen Sheba. See, she's a peacemaker. Lone Language the peacemaker. And she has beautiful eyes. # Hey, I just got back from another world # It was way, way past on the other side # It was across the mountain and through the sea # Past the moon, beyond all things that we've dreamed about # You've never in your life seen such colours # That glows like a twinkle in an eye... # WHISTLING The Museum of Modern Art in New York now has four of William Scott's paintings. He's also fond of making Halloween masks. And yes, that was him in Selfridge's window. William's been doing a series of paintings very recently about reinventing his life in the '70s. So William paints himself as either a successful basketball player, or popular at the prom, or with a happy, healthy family. And what he's doing is, he's going back to those transformative years to make them better. To make his life today better. To make the disability go away. To make an injury to his body that he had then disappear. That's me right here. That's me. It was on the beach at Santa Cruz beach boardwalk in another life of 1974. Another life. Yeah. I'm going to be like that and wear an afro and be like, I want to be like that, wearing an afro. With my...with my new body. With my new body. Er...a perf...a perfect body. - That's Michael Jackson.
- Yeah. So you're on the front cover of Modern Painters, William? Yeah, that's right. That's a great picture. That's Christina? An invention, yeah. "Dear Christina Hernandez. I have been single for a long time. "I am tired being, it bothers me too much. "I wanted a wife real bad. "I've never had any kids. "I wanted to become a father. For good. "Christina, I wanted you to be "putting me into friendship and social skills." - Yeah.
- Have you developed your friendship and social skills? - Nah.
- You're pretty lovable, William, I think.
- Yeah, uh-huh. There's something very moving and powerful about this place. It feels like an environment where anything is possible. And there is room for wit, for charm, and for mystery and magic. Art is about looking at the world in different ways. It lets us see things through the eyes of its maker. And in doing so, it refreshes our own view of the world. It's a tonic for the imagination. Every one of these artists has created and inhabits their own world with such conviction that it becomes recognisable to us. And the best part of all... is that we are invited to step inside. - OK?
- Yeah. # Welcome to my world # Won't you come on in? # Miracles, I guess # Still happen now and then # Step into my heart # Leave your cares behind # Welcome to my world # Built with you in mind # Waiting just for you # Welcome to my world. # OK, that's it, that's it, Jack, it's a wrap. What are we doing here? Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
Wonderful doc! Thank you.