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Automatically transcribed, so expect the odd mangled word. Names have been corrected by hand.

So what is Studio BRUT? It comes from the term Art Brut, which was founded by Jean Dubuffet, which basically means raw art. So it's art without any volition as such, without any training, without any prior planning, it's raw expression, and the studio that we've created is for outsider artists like ourselves. Harrie and I haven't trained in art, we've just followed a passion that we both have, and we're creating a space. This is partly for ourselves, we wanted a bigger studio, one of the space where we could call it our own and do bigger pieces, and then we've got the opportunity to support other artists by giving residencies, workshops, and other opportunities to paint with us.

And yeah, it's going to be so much more, but I think it's important because with being an outsider, there is the sense of being rebellious, but there's also another side of it where you feel illegitimate because you haven't got the MFA, you haven't got the final show that the university sets up for you and brings people to buy your work. You don't have that kind of start or exposure, so you've got to do a lot of things yourself, and we just want a kind of mentor of an artist in a way through creating this space and environment and a way of encouraging the untrained. Over to you, Harrie. Untrained, yes, but more importantly, untamed. Artists that haven't been told there's only one way to do things, there's a right way and a wrong way.

Artists that say to heck with the convention and create with materials that maybe people would be trained out of combining because it's not tradition, it's not the norm, it's not the way that it's done. There's a huge amount of freedom in outsider artists and what they can create. Yeah, it's wild, it's wild and it's a beautiful thing. And you're right, there's a whole issue, like at what point are you an artist? Can you call yourself an artist?

People go, yeah, but you haven't got this and you haven't got that and you don't have a degree and you don't have X, Y, and Z exhibitions and residencies abroad and all of these big things, these big career things. Well, a lot of the time, outsider artists don't have those things, it's not because of a lack of talent, it's a lack of access because they don't have the traditional pathway to go into these elevated opportunities, right? It's a wild thing, it's a wild world. And there's a lot of weird barriers out there that we at Studio BRUT are saying to hell, to hell with those barriers. Show us your work, that's what we care about.

We care about what you're putting on that canvas, not what degree you have in your back pocket like that. Yeah, it's hopefully we're going to make quite a magical space that gives people that platform, that space to create. Space is so underestimated. Having an actual place to go and paint that's not your living room is a massive thing. It does a massive thing mentally to your head and how you're approaching your work.

Space is so incredibly valuable and it's something that we've been starved of for so long. But now we've got our hands on a big beautiful piece of space. It feels like it's our duty to share it and create those opportunities and the access that we didn't have before and for other outsider artists like us. There's amazing, amazing outsider artists all over Swindon but they're in quiet little pockets, quite isolated. And we need to break that isolation and build the community and have that community seen.

Yeah, there's a lot of potential here and it's so exciting. It's so exciting, right? Oh my goodness. I'm sat outside of the studio right now while Steve is indoors and he's putting together a giant cube ahead of our exhibition opening this weekend. It's a pretty impressive cube.

But the beautiful thing is Steve has got the space to experiment and try something new, something largely three-dimensional that without studio group, without this physical space, it's not something you can pop up in your bathroom, you know? Space is highly, highly valuable and underestimated. Oh my fucking god, I am so glad you said fuck in that recording because throughout my whole first recording I had to keep biting my lip because I was gonna swear and I was like, I don't know we're allowed to swear on this thing that we're recording. So thanks, thanks for ripping that band-aid off. I feel a lot more comfortable now.

I don't have to filter myself. Psycho, what a fucking great film as well. Oh my god, I'm such a bigger lover of old classic horror. Huge lover of old classic horror and psycho is one of my top, what's it called, you know? Like when you first fall in love with a genre, it's one of those movies that opened that gateway drug into the horror world.

It's just such a great piece of art that of yours, Steve. I love it so much. And I think like even the image away from the context of it's a scene from Psycho, you know? This sort of raw visceral screaming cry that's just expressed so beautifully and that piece of artwork I just feel inhabits a lot of what we're we're doing with art brut and making some flipping noise. Making outsider art scene and being loud and because, you know, outside our eyes we all live in our little individual little pockets like little hermits or hobbits in our in our little hobbit caves creating artwork almost compulsively.

But the thing about limitations, I would argue, okay bear with me on this one, I would argue that the limitations that outsider artists have is access. So we might not have limitations in terms of like conventions and technique and how we approach artwork etc. But for outsider artists our limitations quite often exist in access. Access to particular materials, access to space, access to a whole world of things like, for example, oil painting is a good example of this. Financial access is bloody expensive to get into oil painting.

Like good quality oil paints are so expensive and it's something that I've always loved oil oil paintings and it's something I've always wanted to play around with but the financial access barrier kind of meant that working with high quality oil paints wasn't something I could do until I was, I thought fuck it why don't I try and make my own oil paints from pigment because I stumbled across places like you know Jackson's art where they sell pigments. Also that place in town there's a great place in Swindon called MAMS Gallery and it's a gallery that offer like training and really great opportunities for people to go and do workshops and classes but also it's like a really nice comfy coffee shop and they do events and they're really supportive of artists regardless whether you've got like degrees or anything but one of the things that they sell in there is jars of pigment and it got my brain ticking and thinking about okay so if I could make my own oil paint from pigment maybe oil painting becomes something that I can access because like a tube of high quality oil paint can be up to like sort of 20 20 odd quid plus for one tube of paint but you can get pigment for a lot cheaper than that you can get a nice amount of pigment beautiful like beautiful quality pigments and add combine it with linseed oil and there's technique to it it's the learning process but that's the beauty of the internet you can learn so many things through places like youtube where there's a whole plethora of other artists creating and sharing their process like that's a beautiful thing so it's so I kind of learned from stuff on the internet and from talking with other artists and I've started making my own oil paints by taking pigment and combining it with marble dust is something that I use for for my oil paint making there's a place in swindon that is like a little mini quarry and one of their outputs is they do marble dust and it's a great it's a great component for making your oil paints but I literally I take pigment I take some marble dust for thickening and linseed oil and you grind it down with a mullah and do your stuff and it takes time it takes a lot of time and effort but I really enjoy that time and contact with my materials the process of making your own paints as an artist is incredible like it's a whole new world you can control how much pigment and how strong the the rich the paint is and how viscous it is and you spend some real time working with your materials and understanding them on like a whole new level I mean I took that a bit further because I am a nerd and I've started um I've started examining my pigments and oil paint stuff under a microscope and then I've been taking like microscopic photography just just by using my camera down the microscope from my phone and capturing images of these pigments and paints that I've been making on a microscopic level and that's just fascinating and nerdy as hell um hang on I'm on a tangent here what was I saying oh materials yeah so like access to materials and things oil painting just always felt so far out of my reach as an outsider because I didn't have that I didn't I don't have the the money to invest in 20 pounds for a small tube of of oil paint but it's so much cheaper and so much more personal to make your own um and that's one of those fun skills like that I've really enjoyed learning um that I'm keen to share with people at studio group with some work chalky stuff and teaching others how to how to make their own paint um I also do it with like acrylic um the acrylic stuff it's it's the same sort of process um I just I'm a bit more excited about the oil paint um and now all of a sudden I can make these giant canvases with vast amount of oil paints and the the things that I'm creating from it are just so exciting and playful and explorative and nerdy and yeah so what I'm getting at is that I think for outsider artists a lot of the time um a lot of the time where there's sort of people who are on the sort of margins of society and we don't have necessarily huge affluent backgrounds to fund fund this passion so we make do and we do what we can to create what what we're trying to express out of ourselves um and like the oil painting for me as as an example is me overcoming an obstacle and going about it a sort of weird avenue um so that limitation has become um a whole new thing in itself a whole new plethora of artwork it's really exciting right it's really exciting it's really exciting when we can take the things that limit us and use that limitation to create something amazing um but of course there's like there's loads of other things I think that limit outsider artists not just the um not just the access to maybe materials but it could be time you know time is a very precious thing or it could be space a place to paint um time to paint you know all of these all of these things that can be taken for granted a bit more in a traditional format when you've got the the years to spend that um like doing a degree at a art school or art university um but also okay here we go tangent continuing the thing about untrained I might like outsider artists have alternative training training in different things that enrich are what we create so my background for example I'm I'm trained as a theater practitioner I'm a trained uh I've got a degree in world performance so it's um performance acting singing dancing um all to do with um cultural specific world specific practices things like um what sort of things did we do uh we did a lot of brazilian theater japanese no theater balinese dance like when when you've studied things or trained in things that aren't necessarily art they still feed into your art like the the conversation you're saying about style is if you look at my artwork like I've got a whole bunch of different collections and they've all got very different sort of aesthetic so people would argue that maybe I didn't have a set style but I debate that actually innately all of my work comes back to storytelling and it all has this sort of theatrical and that sort of immersive expression of of of whatever it is behind that painting um so what I'm getting at is that although an outsider artist might not have traditional pathway art training the training that they have or skills that they have the life lessons that they have everything feeds into what we create it just means that our training has come from life in different pathways in different places and all of that feeds into what we do um all of all of it a whole sort of suit a whole sort of suit our lived experiences lives history family backgrounds um you know our education which might not be art fine art and things like that like everything feeds into who we are and a lot of outsider artists are very highly educated people and they have amazing training just not in the art field um or the traditional view of training to be an artist um because you could argue that every day of our lives has been training us to be the artists that we are and what we create um I don't know yeah that was a bit of a that was a bit of a long thought there untamed that's it that's the one I think we officially have to change it to untamed untrained just sounds a bit lackluster doesn't it like if you're untrained as a doctor wouldn't be um very professional but untamed on the other hand you're not restricted by any habits that you've learned um you're not conforming to your other classmates or you're not conforming to your art teacher uh due to his opinions about how much he loves Suzanne or something you're totally free to do what you want and that is amazing um but again on the other hand that has been a struggle for me as well because you can literally create what you want and that can become massively overwhelming so something I've heard that has really helped of that is an Oscar Wilde quote was it awesome wells um the enemy of art is the absence of limitations and I think even though as outsider artists we have no limits and what can be done in terms of imagination and lack of um ways of doing things we I find it useful to be thinking about like not not so much how can we restrict this but having some kind of restriction whether that be a particular theme or particular material but if you think about John Dubuque no I can't say his name again John Dubuque he was a great experimenter and he wasn't afraid to draw anything create anything use sand sculpture um he used like butterflies wings in a few pieces he reminds me I went to see his work in Barbican um in 2021 and I was with a friend who's not really an art fan but he likes to think he knows a bit and there's he's got a Muhammad Ali piece which he loves but it's not hanging up so he's kind of like thinks he's into art but he doesn't he's not really but he he came along with me and he said I'm not really impressed with this exhibition I could do this and I didn't say it at the time but I was telling that story to someone else and they said well he didn't do that did he and that's the thing about creating whatever you want it doesn't have to be as a as an outsider artist doesn't have to be Caravaggio or Leonardo or Picasso or it doesn't have to be anything like that it can be something really mundane that you've created in your own style without having to try and create a style it's it's freeing in that respect because when I started painting I thought that I had to have a style so I tried tried hard to make a style and I was using this negative kind of exposure style like on my piece sphere which is like the poster piece and the exhibition I do like it a lot and it's from the film psycho it's like a shower scene the iconic shower scene done in red black black and white and yeah it's gone from the tangent of what the fuck I was saying yeah so I was trying to do this style and I had this mentor he's this wise bloke cross crossly he um into his art and he's somewhat of a a painter himself and he said to me just stick to your naive style um compared me to Lowry which was I couldn't my mind couldn't quite accept because he um but in terms of the naive style that I had it was natural it was not contrived it was authentic it was coming from the enjoyment of me creating so since then I've stuck with that and I do experiment with things materials colors uh mediums and whatnot but oftentimes it comes back to painting but I just want to get this feeling I feel inside to other people in my situation as a outsider that you can do some amazing things and you don't have to have the legitimacy of or so-called legitimacy of have been been through art school and that doesn't undermine that if us if that's your path and everything you want to do that that's cool I'm not saying art school is shit or anything um sometimes I do think that because it's like Harrie is saying about being unattainable you're depending what art school you go to you're kind of being indoctrinated somewhat um but then some say you have to learn the fundamentals of shading color perspective and composition um and sometimes I felt like I've lacked that but I haven't gone out of my way to learn that stuff and I just create my own thing in my own way and I want other people to get that and yeah the space we're creating is all about that and it's all about the expression and freedom and being untamed so pigments and differing backgrounds just saying that out loud so remember the your two points that stood out that I wanted to talk about um so we've got 10 minutes left in total so we don't want to go over the 40 minutes um but I'll try and get to be succinct because I do waffle a bit so um yeah really enjoyed that um the the whole pigment thing is something I've been looking into for probably about four years and I just don't have the head space to do it um and quite ADHD and um I don't yeah I can't the thought of sitting down and mixing paints um stresses me out a bit but it's something I do want to do and I think with the studio brute space you've got the physical space to do more and bigger paintings as you said but I'd love to mix my own oil paints as well so that that could be a workshop in itself like you said and I'd love to come along to that because the good thing about that is it's a it's a container isn't it it's like come here for an hour and we're going to show you how to mix oil paints my mind will settle down and think yeah let's focus on this there's nothing else I need to do so yeah I really look forward to that so I bought some pigments um from Temu probably crack ones but I was just playing well to be honest I haven't actually got them out of the packet yet but um yeah that's something uh experimentation is at the the heart of being an outsider artist I think um and a lot of that is as Harrie said making do with the materials we have and like like you said mixing your own because you couldn't afford the 20 quid for a small bottle on a tube of paint I'm the same as well and um I've done a few oil paintings and they yeah it just costs a lot and it takes a long time to dry but with the with the space you can leave loads out drying which is absolutely amazing and work on five at once if you if you fancy it um and yeah it's um in terms of different backgrounds like I want I really wanted to go to art college but I was too shy um I remember going to see the art college uh like an open day and I just went along and I felt really stupid um um the uh the tutor there was asking what type of art do you think this is and I said abstract I had no idea but I was wrong and then I don't know if it is the way he said it or just my internal dialogue saying that was stupid which happened a lot but I decided not to go because it was out of my town um um it was in Swindon I was living and grew up in Marlborough at the time so it's about 12 miles away but I didn't yeah I didn't end up going and sometimes I do regret that but on the other hand as Harrie said playing to the strengths I did I signed up to multimedia so I learned about web design graphic design video editing audio editing because it may do much of but the others I've made use of and having that knowledge helped me create the website for studio groups and do all sorts of online stuff um and bringing that perspective to my art is is definitely I don't know I feel like because I've come back to art in a uh after I think it was 20 years um so I dropped out of my A level art class because my tutor said I can't draw large scale so I just told him to fuck off or I said it to him in person I don't know but I did drop out of his class um I did go on to do a GMVQ which is more chilled out but then um once I left um I thought I had to drop out because it wasn't useful and they're just you know going out drinking and all that you at that age you kind of forget hobbies um and then picked it up 20 years later so long story short there's 20 years of life experience there that I've got to paint from and just general life experience building my own confidence um learning how to set up events and stuff like that I bring all that to my art now um and it's I was going to say it's very powerful well it it feels powerful to me in terms of expressing all of that and I think there's so many outsiders like that who've started different areas have started late and I think more power to them it's bringing that rich history and God knows how how I would have done if I went to art college and went to university to study art and all that I don't don't really know I would imagine that I might have struggled a bit for trying to paint anything and just comparing myself to others all the time if I don't know just imagining that but I'm grateful that I started again and um yeah running out of time Carrie you've got about four minutes to wrap up morning sorry I've just woken up um four minutes four minutes to save the world that's exciting it's also so exciting and I'm like locally really excited to like meet so many new outsider artists by us like reaching out to the community and stuff um because like you said about different backgrounds and skills and we're gonna learn all sorts of shit from each other and and that's a really exciting thing um because everyone sort of seems to have their their niche skill that's rooted in their passion which is really exciting and like you said really powerful um yeah so it's a fucking revolution my friend it's a fucking revolution um by finding these really powerful artists with these niche amazing skills and talents and being like hey we have a place to to join up together now um we can we can break that isolation a bit and skill share with each other and make things and meet people and oh it's just so exciting it's just so exciting and I'm really excited to be working with you as well Steve um couldn't couldn't get this thing off the ground without your amazing skills and talents and yeah very grateful my friend I didn't even fucking know what outsider artist what what an outsider artist was until you invited me to be part of an exhibition um last year at your art group exhibition um it's um it's been quite a powerful thing learning what an outsider artist is and learning that that's that's the bracket that I fall into um because it's not about falling into a box it's about finding a word that can unite me with other artists a word that creates community that realization that oh I'm an outsider artist that's okay I I understand that and now I can connect to other outsider artists and we can build a community and support each other with this sort of like-minded talent and struggles and all those beautiful things um so yeah I don't even know who I was Steve until you introduced it to me until you invited me to be a part of something under the art group movement um yeah it's exciting it's very exciting