Range - David Epstein Page 0,68
Terror. (His voice may be best known as head troll Grand Pabbie in Disney’s Frozen.) This book gave me an excuse to ask Hinds about his career path, and he recalled having been a “flighty gadabout” unsure of his direction when he enrolled as a law student at Queen’s University Belfast. His attention was quickly diverted “due to a keen interest in snooker, poker, and experimental dance,” he told me. One of Hinds’s class tutors had seen him as a twelve-year-old portraying Lady Macbeth in a school play, and suggested he bag legal studies and apply to drama school. “He also had the goodness to speak to my parents on the matter, who were rather trepidatious,” Hinds told me. “Off I went to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and my life in the professional theater began.”
The Van Gogh biography by Steven Naifeh and his late partner and coauthor Gregory White Smith is one of the best books I have ever read in any genre. Naifeh and Smith met in law school as both were realizing it was not for them. They started cowriting books on an eclectic array of topics, from true crime to men’s style, even as an editor told them they needed to pick one genre and stick with it. Their willingness to dive into new areas paid unexpected dividends. When an editor at another publishing house asked them to write a guide to using lawyers’ services, it led them to found Best Lawyers, which spawned a massive industry of peer-recommendation publications. “If we hadn’t taken that idea [to create a reference to help people select lawyers] and run with it,” Naifeh told me, “our lives would have been dramatically different, and it wasn’t like anything we had done before.” They might never have had the means and freedom to spend a decade researching their Van Gogh biography, or their biography of Jackson Pollock that won the Pulitzer Prize.
Pollock, Naifeh told me, “was literally one of the least talented draftsmen at the Art Students League.” Naifeh argues that, as with Van Gogh, Pollock’s lack of traditional drawing skill was what led him to invent his own rules for making art. As schools offering standardized paths in art have proliferated, “one of the problems is that artists tend to be products of those schools,” said Naifeh, an artist himself.
Maybe that has helped fuel an explosion of interest in so-called outsider art, by practitioners who began without a standard path in sight. Of course, there is nothing wrong with coming through the formal talent development system, but if that’s the only pipeline that exists, some of the brightest talents get missed. “Outsider artists” are the self-taught jazz masters of visual art, and the originality of their work can be stunning. In 2018, the National Gallery of Art featured a full exhibition dedicated to self-taught artists; art history programs at Stanford, Duke, Yale, and the Art Institute of Chicago now offer seminars in outsider art. Katherine Jentleson, who in 2015 was appointed as a full-time curator of self-taught art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, told me that these artists typically started just by experimenting and doing things they liked, while working other jobs. “The majority did not begin their art making in earnest until after retirement,” Jentleson said.
She introduced me to the sculptor and painter Lonnie Holley, a prominent self-taught artist who grew up extremely poor in Alabama. In 1979, when he was twenty-nine, his sister’s two children died in a fire. The family could not afford gravestones, so Holley gathered discarded sandstone at a nearby foundry and carved them himself. “I didn’t even know what art was!” he told me, his eyes wide, as if taken by surprise at his own story. But it felt good. He carved gravestones for other families and started making sculptures out of anything he could find. I was standing with him near the door of an Atlanta gallery featuring his work when he grabbed a paper clip and quickly bent it into an intricate silhouette of a face, which he jabbed decoratively into the eraser of a pencil the woman at the front desk was using. It is hard to imagine a time before he made art, since it seems like he can hardly touch something before his hands begin exploring what else it might become.
Jentleson also pointed me to Paradise Garden, ninety miles northwest of Atlanta, the painting- and sculpture-filled property of the late minister Howard Finster,