|
The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art
|
| List Price: | $20.00 |
| Price: | $13.40 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com
39 new or used available from $10.90
Average customer review:
Product Description
With his prodigious gift for conversation and quietly observant storytelling, Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation; Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now lives as a recluse in rural Wisconsin and paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter was brutally murdered. These artists’ works are as wildly varied as their life stories, but without sensationalizing or patronizing them, Bottoms—one of today’s finest young writers—gets at the heart of what they have in common: the struggle to make sense, through art, of their difficult personal histories.
In doing so, he 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.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #195867 in Books
- Published on: 2007-03-30
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 200 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Driven by painful memories of a schizophrenic brother who had visions and turned to Christian fundamentalist thinking, Bottoms (Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness) sought out religious outsider artists, hoping to discover whether artistic expression helps relieve the suffering of visionaries who hover between madness and ecstasy. He writes thoughtfully of his quest, which takes him first to Georgia to visit Paradise Gardens, a four-acre Christian art environment replete with biblical quotes and apocalyptic predictions created by the late Rev. Howard Finster. In South Carolina, Bottoms interviews William Thomas Thompson, a paralyzed ex-millionaire who was inspired by an apocalyptic vision to paint a 300-foot mural called Revelation Revealed. In Wisconsin, the author calls on painter and sculptor Norbert Kox, once a member of the Outlaw biker gang and now a born-again Christian who lives in an abandoned store and creates savage critiques of organized religion. Although the art Bottoms sees is not to his liking, and the artists' politics are far to the right of his own, he presents sensitive vignettes. His poignant book, imbued with troubling thoughts of his brother's illness and his own uneasiness about his motives in seeking out marginalized artists, ends on a positive note: the creative process does indeed have life-affirming powers. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising : “In The Colorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms explores the frontier between inspiration and psychosis with the expressive power, the passionate fervor, and the faithfully unflinching honesty for which his work is deservedly known. This book is incisive, startling, and often genuinely moving.”—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising
Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies : “If James Agee and Tom Wolfe were to cross their bare wires, the resulting flash would be The Colorful Apocalypse. Greg Bottoms gets us deep inside not just the art, but the making, the visionary angst that drives these outsiders, these unassimilated originals. A savvy, but also deeply heartfelt, intensely searching tribute.”—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies
Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After : “Greg Bottoms’s fascination with artists whose work can be considered either visionary—the expression of deep Christian faith—or deranged, fanatical, and morbid, stems in part from his own anguished attempts to understand where sanity and insanity meet. It is his haunting testimony of the search for this unfindable answer that makes The Colorful Apocalypse so refreshing, its essays of discovery so open, attentive, and deeply compelling.”—Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After
Michael Lesy, author of Wisconsin Death Trip : “In The Colorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms serves his readers as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow did in The Heart of Darkness. The river Bottoms navigates is a flood of outsider art, its heart of darkness a torrent of pain, sorrow, anger, suspicion, and longing. Like Paul on the road to Tarsus, each of the artists Bottoms investigates or interviews has experienced a shattering revelation. The outcomes of their epiphanies are seldom benign: paintings that are hellfire sermons brim with dead babies, Satanic brides, and world-destroying conspiracies. Bottoms is our guide to an art that succeeds in making darkness visible. View this art—read this book—only if you dare.”
Susan Kandel Los Angeles Times : "Economics, semantics and sociology percolate through Greg Bottoms'' engaging and intermittently unnerving narrative… [But] despite the author''s academic bona fides (he''s an assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont) and his frequent nods to the likes of social anthropologist Clifford Geertz and writer Susan Sontag, his subject is personal. . . . Bottoms is impassioned, curious, relentless and angry, but never cynical, least of all about the power of creative expression to salve one''s longings."
About the Author
Greg Bottoms is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Angelhead: My Brother’s Descent into Madness, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Customer Reviews
Greg Bottoms, The Colorful Apocalpyse
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.
Great Travel Memoir
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.
readable criticism and good travelogue
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.
