All right, so let’s consider the works of outsider artist Henry Dodger. Dodger lived by himself in a tiny apartment in Chicago in the 1900s. He had no friends and spent all his spare time their alone creating hundreds of paintings and drawings. He had never formally studied art and kept his work completely private, so no one ever saw it or responded to it during his life time.

And so, when you see Dodger’s work you notice how unique it is. It doesn’t remind you of anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s very much his own. For example, one piece, it’s a water-color painting, in this piece he illustrates a story, about the adventure of seven children. But see, Dodger had a really hard time drawing human figures. Yet he managed to come up with his own rather unique solution for the problem. He simply cut out pictures of children from newspapers and magazines and pasted them into his own painted illustrations of trees, flowers and grass.

The results look, um, a little strange. Dodger’s picture looks more cluttered, more crowded with details than the pictures of other artists, because its entire surface is painted and there are no spaces left empty. It’s also a lot longer than pictures of most other artists, about nine feet long.