albert louden 1943

'A badge?', I asked, momentarily taken in.

'I'm joking', he said, 'there has been a market in outsider works ever since
Dubuffet started showing them. That's a fact whether you like it or not. But
where do the people end up who create these works, people like me who
deliberately choose to be artists? We're not all like Adolf Wolfli, painting
just out of frustration.

'Nowadays, I ask myself how I can be so famous and yet so broke. The
answer is: only by being an outsider'. Or rather, an ousted outsider. One of
the many ironies of Louden's plight is that, having been feted then dumped by
the market, he is painting more in the spirit of an outsider than ever before.
That is, he paints what he likes rather than what the market likes. Musgrave
wanted his figuratives, first in pastel, more recently in oil stick- ballooning
men and women teetering over or sprouting out of one another. They were
what made Louden's name. Musgrave was reluctantly won over by the lands-
capes but never took any of the abstracts.

Louden says: 'People couldn't see any connection between the abstract
paintings and the figuratives. They wanted continuity. Sheer tunnel vision
on their part. I imagine if L.S.Lowry had started doing something different
from his stick figures he would have been out on a limb, too'.

Over the years, whether they sold or not, Louden has continued to paint all
three: figurative, landscape and abstract. He is now experimenting with
big abstracts in oils. They have patches of bright colour applied in a pointilliste
manner quite unknown to those who own his figuratives. The Boundary Gallery,
which once sold a painting of his for £4,300 and has remained loyal to him
over the years, has offered to exhibit one of them. And in the past few weeks,
something completely different has emerged: ballpoint on canvas, seas
of tiny reptile-like scales, some with a dot in the middle, swirling away in
characteristic Louden fashion.

He paints from the unconscious. Immersed in his work, his attention turns
inwards. What comes out- a threatening figure looming in the middle of an
abstract, perhaps- can startle even him. It was Musgrave, well schooled in
the importance of the outsider's inner world, who recognised his vision
and encouraged him to accept his creative process as natural. Stop analysing,
he would tell him, and get on with it.

The theorists have had a field day with Louden. They have lavished Freudianisms
upon his giant, dominant women (he reckons he has painted just as many
dominant men). But none has been let into the secret of his explosive shapes.
He explained them to me. The key, incongruously, is a postcard of a mountain
cable-car that he sent home from Zillertal in the Swiss Tyrol where he was
taking part in a weight-lifting event at the age of 19.

Imagine the view from that cable-car. But first, imagine standing in the
countryside, for example in Louden's beloved Epping Forest. He explains:
'At the microscopic level of nature, everything is vibrant, alive-- insects
buzzing away, sap flowing, leaves and blades of grass quivering in the wind-
but the eye can hardly see them and it seemed to me to be a delusion to
think that I could represent the reality of that fine structure in landscape
painting.

'But when I looked down from the great height of the cable-car, I realised
that although you could not see the tiny things, not even fences and walls,
that great force was still there. It was not confined to the small scale but
was exploding outwards, shaping the landscape. Even the fir trees and
houses seemed to be following the contours of the hills, obeying their
perspective in great sweeps.

'At first, the only way I could represent this was in my head. The force was
no more than an abstraction. But then, in my paintings, I started twisting
branches upside down so that they became shapes lying into the landscape.
I gave them another dimension. The same thing began to happen to the figures'.

A different force also inspires the explosive movement: political upheaval.
Louden was a socialist activist in the Seventies and early Eighties. 'There's
an internal struggle. It's like two people having a conversation that suddenly
explodes into violence on the social scale. Then it all goes back to what it
was before. It's a never ending thing'.

At the moment of creation, faced with a blank board or canvas, he is not
consciously aware of such intellectualisations. The first brushstroke might
dart towards a knot in the plywood or a blemish in the canvas. His strokes then
explode spontaneously into a figure or a landscape. He never knows
what to expect.


[quelle: internet]