The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

counterpart of the thought disorder apparent in his written notebooks 109 . The well
known collections of psychiatric art work which were used to illustrate psychopathology
were by selected exceptionally talented painters studied for research. The knowledge
cannot be separated from the intention. Work by naive artists is personal, rarely involves
an audience and does not operate in a deliberate way to research and develop the work.
It does not contribute to art because it does not intentionally refer to it and thus it cannot
be placed on the continuum. Therefore, for work by non-talented patients, art critical
interpretations, which vary with the theoretical stance of the interpreter, are not
appropriate.
The assumption that a picture is a sort of print-out of how the world is seen and
that some unconscious force paints through the artist must be wrong. The best 'outsider'
artists, even though they might lack training and technical skill, show a search for
organisation, considerable awareness of balance and awareness of the world and that
knowledge is communicated through their pictures. Studies of art and perception show
that in order to construct an image of power and balance a great deal of awareness is
needed 110 . Making a picture is a constructive process and a complicated one, with
metaphors such as paint standing for light and 3d objects.
Studies of psychiatrically disturbed artists tended to focus on the discussion of
whether there was something about mental illness itself which contributed to artistic
109
from J.M. MacGregor (1989), The Discovery of the art of the insane , N.J.:Princetown U.P.
110
Ernst Gombrich (1977) Art and Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation , Princeton
NJ: Phaidon (5th ed. original 1960); J.J. Gibson (1980) foreward in M.A. Hagen, (ed.), The Perception
of Pictures V.1, New York: Ac. Press, and for an explanation that cognition must be involved in moving
between images to interpret spatial relations: Shona Rogers and Alan Costall (1983), Pictorial perception
and Gibson's concept of information, Leonardo , V.16(3):180-2.
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