Outsider Art of Japan

Took the little grits to see the exhibition at the Wellcome, Outsider Art from Japan.

This is well worth - as you rush between trains at Euston and King's Cross - preserving an hour or two in your day to visit: stop, look, and wonder at the borderlands of obsessional madness and gifted creativity.

After five minutes in the company of the outsiders and their astonishingly complex and provocative art, I secretly want to be in their club, and long to count myself as one of the gang - if only I can get there by running a blog, forgetting about the audience, and let's not say it's the kid home ed record, I claim it is my driven madness to rearrange letters into wrods. Maybe they'll let me in?

The Gritlets - to whose child-sympathies the art immediately appeals and makes sense of all - emerge delighted, gawping open-mouthed at new pleasures to pursue with thread and sticky tape, and taking away loads of ideas for further scribblings, sewings and clay-making.

I leave, feeling not only that I want to be Outsider of Buckinghamshire but somehow curiously affirmed in my approach to art with the little grits, which is, more or less, do what you like. If your art needs a twisted coathanger and 2m of duct tape, so be it. I have worked on that art principle, more or less, since the little grits could stand up; the only rules have been a) tidy up after yourself (ignored) and b) if it is messy, do it outside or in the garage art shed (also ignored).

As an unexpected side effect, it renewed my contempt of the sacks-of-rubbish brigade. It doesn't take much wit or wisdom to put a sack of rubbish in a gallery and call it art, but it took hours of concentration with a needle and thread for Satoshi Morita to produce the beautiful Untitled.