Cary Outis

The work on show here represents output over the last ten years or so, and I am publishing online in order to be more visible than I have previously preferred! I very much hope my work interests and engages you a little.

I use oil paints, Indian ink, acrylics, charcoal and graphite pencil, and both water- and oil-based printing inks. Also steel, wood and stone, depending on necessity.

Here's a little about why I am an artist:

One very strong reason for making art is to be somewhere else perceptually, somewhere equally as real and valid as the normal place where the mind sits, except quieter. The staunching of the internal conversation, even a little, seems to allow us to rediscover much more of its huge range, its scope of insight and its agility. The only problem then is, how to report back, if the words have stopped. Making art is surely one of those ways.

I am convinced that the human situation includes a habit of fixing the attention rigidly and exhaustingly on one single but magnificently complex version of the universe, which so absorbs our entire quota of energy that we defend such debilitating and crazy behaviour to the hilt, just as someone doing something they know to be wrong yells about its rightness all the more. For example notice how a statement like the above can invoke a defensive hostility. Fair enough, but consider your perception of the world when you were very young ~

Before you became so skilful at handling the awareness that finally came into fixed focus around you, did you not experience a sensitivity and insight that seemed boundless? What about when you finally turned away from such ' alternative' understanding and toward the thrilling skills of rationalisation and analysis? Was there not an accompanying feeling of loss?

Some people romanticize childhood, I believe, for this very reason. The sight of a bald and ageing James Taylor at a concert shouting out," I'm never going to grow up", sums up the confusion of the situation of the creative adult , for me. But breadth of perception, even access to wisdom itself, is surely not only the province of the immature. There are many artists are among those adults who arrange quiet contemplation as part of their everyday lives, a decision which demands a ferocious act of will. Imagine a thousand people walking towards a collapsing building, and you're heading the other way.