I spent ungodly amounts of time with that computer, first setting up some basic financial reports for the paper and then creating — and personally populating — a historical content index using a primitive database program called DBmaster. Considering that I was probably the only person who ever used that index, it was something of a boondoggle, but I learned a lot, and pack rat that I am found it deeply satisfying to go through and document years of back issues.

Computingwise, my next weekly newspaper job was a step up. They were actually using computers rather than typewriters to compose and edit stories. We were equipped with Apple IIes, some even with dual five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives. That meant we could stop swapping in the Word Juggler program disk to run the program and a separate disk to save files. (At some point we acquired AppleWorks, the first office software suite I encountered, but Word Juggler offered superior word processing functionality.)

During this period I bought the first computer I personally owned, an Apple IIc. This was a portable evolution from the IIe, albeit with some enhanced features, including more memory (at least 128k) and better graphics. Unlike most personal computers of the time, this one actually looked like it had been designed. And the box was truly portable, even by later laptop standards, though that was because it had no built-in battery or display. The monitor was relatively transportable, but still a schlep to haul. I got the company to buy an extra one so I could have one display at work and one at home. The IIc came with one built-in floppy, and I added the external floppy drive to avoid the dreaded disk swap.

Not long after I bought it, the paper’s finance guy invited me into his office to show off his new, first-generation Macintosh. It was of course like no other computer I’d seen, not just because of the graphical UI, but also because it was the first (and ultimately one of the only) computers equipped with a keyboard that lacked arrow keys. That’s a usability faux pas we can lay personally on Steve Jobs, who believed people should use the mouse and not the keyboard to navigate. Of course it reflected his admirable – if in this case misguided – attention to detail. He eventually relented on the cursor keys, but as all Mac users know, to this day the company has bullheadedly refused to incorporate a standard delete key.

(I’d argue that Jobs’ genius lay most of all in his ability to make good choices across an overwhelming range of details. Most people in senior management eventually give up micromanaging both because of the resentment it breeds among colleagues and simple inability to keep up. It takes incredible focus, fabulous memory, and instincts that prove right nearly all the time, to sustain the kind of involvement that Jobs is credited with. Most of us surrender; he didn’t.)

Just a couple of years later, I left the Apple world for a long time to come. I acquired my first x86 computer, an IBM PC-XT hand-me-down from my brother equipped with a hard drive, all of 10 megabytes. I’m pleased to say that mostly I ran an early x86 variant of UNIX on that computer, only rarely booting DOS from a floppy.

I progressed to running DOS and later Windows, but when Jobs released a version of his Nextstep system ported to the x86 platform in 1993, I was excited. My brother had a Next cube so I had some idea of how well this UNIX-derived computer worked. Nextstep became my primary environment for the next year or so, including an MS Windows emulation application that wasn’t all that clunkier than current Parallels and VMware implementations. And just like a family trip to Hong Kong when I was 16 made it impossible for me to ever find a decent Chinese restaurant in the U.S., Nextstep for years made every graphical user interface seem woefully lacking. Its elegance, utility, and UNIX-based stability were far ahead of just about any 20th Century version of MS Windows. It was also clearly ahead of the old Mac OS, which sapped my motivation to switch back to Apple (along with the Mac’s second-tier software and driver support, apart from graphics and desktop publishing).

Unfortunately, Nextstep was a commercial dead-end and I fell squarely back into the PC camp. I did go through some iPods, however. Then, with the 2006 release of the MacBook Pro, I returned to the Apple fold, regretting only that I bought a travel-unfriendly 17” version. Since OS X was built on the foundation of Nextstep, I could finally have my cake and eat it too. The user interface remained way superior to Windows XP and Vista — more elegant, more empowering to the user, and simply more efficient.

I’m now on my second MacBook Pro, a 15” version. We still use the 17” in my house, and we also have what is certainly the nicest computer I’ve ever used, a Macbook Air, which dislodged my first IBM Thinkpad laptop as the computer I’ve come closest to loving. The Air is light, incredibly fast and lovely to behold. My next personal laptop will be the 13” Air; I’m just trying to hold out for a bigger solid-state drive.

Meanwhile, we also have three iPhones and two iPads, the second one being a unit I won in a trade-show raffle. I still have a pair of aging Windows PCs, and I’m not sure I’m prepared to live 100% Windows free. It would be like going entirely without network TV — it’s mostly dross, but I kind of want to keep in touch a little with that world. Plus, my work machine is a Windows notebook. And every time I touch a keyboard I’d rather be using a Mac, for which I can, of course, thank the late Mr. Jobs.

The catalog published last year in conjunction with Ramirez’s epochal one-man at the American Folk Art Museum had many virtues. Contributions by Anderson and by Victor and Kristin Espinosa supplied essential (and in the Espinosas’ case ground-breaking) background and perspective. But several of the more than half-dozen essays felt like heft more than light.

There are only 23 pages of text in this new book, including footnotes. Introductory sections include a foreword from the artist’s descendants as well as an acknowledgements page whose plethora of thanks to lawyers presumably reflects the family’s assertion of its rights to the oeuvre. A brief essay by Wayne Thiebaud, who encountered Ramirez in the 1950s, provides a rare first-hand description of his working methods.

These late drawings surfaced after wildly favorable publicity around the original AFAM show brought Ramirez to prominence outside the outsider art world. Their discovery represented more than just good fortune for the family of Doctor Max Dunievitz, who had once supplied Ramirez with art materials. The material was produced later in the artist’s life, between 1960 and his death in 1963. His reputation had been based on earlier drawings, so at minimum this is the first chance to see on a large scale how Ramirez’s talent evolved.

If these pictures were more of the same, their discovery would still have added substantially to our knowledge of Ramirez. But they demonstrate definite, and interesting, artistic development from the earlier work. There seems to be a notable tendency toward abstraction and increased use of color (though the bright colors may reflect better preservation in pictures that have been stored for decades rather than hanging on walls).

The artist’s familiar subjects evolved along with the work’s formal qualities. Repetition and patterning are even more intense in his treatment of trains and tunnels. In several horse-and-rider pictures shown here, a trumpet, sometimes grotesquely oversized, replaces guns and bandoliers. In others, horses and riders are mixed up with tunnels and trains. In one series the horse and rider are set on a large, isolated platform amidst a fantastical agglomeration of arches and tunnel entrances.

Some of the most intriguing pictures are the sheets filled with nothing but arches, sometimes dozens of them, with no trains or any other subject — in one case 234 inches of arches. This monumental near-abstraction is unmistakably Ramirez, but it also represents an astounding evolution from the earlier work that made his reputation, work that is more straight-forwardly representational if also surrealistic.

This book also includes three spooky pictures showing a man at a table drawing with a quill pen. In all three there are two rows of arches along the bottom of the drawing, Characteristic mountainous patterns converge along the two outer edges of the top. But what is most striking are the blank eyes that would be staring out at the viewer if there were anything in them to see with.

Altogether, there is lots of fodder for interpretation in these pictures, but the editors and authors show an admirable discipline in not over-reaching in their assessments. The pictures themselves are richly presented, large and sharply reproduced, with a number of foldouts to accommodate extra-wide images.

A version of this review originally appeared in Intuit’s Outsider magazine.

Pity the poor dead outsider artist. Odds are good you’ve been reduced to a collection of anecdotes gathered by an early collector or dealer then recycled, with declining fidelity, through biographical capsules, reviews and newspaper articles. Your life is a series of clichés attached to a stunning body of work.

If you’re exceptionally lucky, like Martin Ramirez, you may eventually pique the interest of serious scholars and become the subject of actual biography. But when your life story is a matter of luck, it can go either way. Witness Bill Traylor, an artist on par with Ramirez in importance and depth, but a test case for a different treatment, a genre that might be labeled “speculative biography.”

The recipe is:

Betty M. Kuyk applied an overlay of African cultural influence to Traylor’s life and work in her 2003 study, African Voices in the African American Heritage. Now Mechal Sobel builds on Kuyk’s work, which she glowingly cites, adding her own focus on the southern black conjure, or hoodoo, culture of mojo hands and spirit bottles.

While they’re at their main points, Sobel and Kuyk each offer tantalizing glimpses at Traylor’s actual life, starting as a slave in 1853 and ending in 1949 near the Montgomery, Alabama, streets where he lived and worked as an artist for several crucial years in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Sobel in particular combed census records, interviewed descendants and looked at other sources to gather as much fact as she could, and indeed overturns some accepted assumptions about Traylor’s life. However, the amount of available fact ultimately did not appear sufficient for her narrative purposes.

Like most of us, Sobel initially found Traylor’s art highly cryptic. But she argues that far from being mysterious, his conjure and African imagery told stories that were opaque to white people but perfectly clear to his intended black audience. Traylor was mounting an eloquent protest against the Jim Crow South in plain view without risking the punishment usually accorded to blacks who resisted the segregationist regime. Indeed, she finds his intentions so apparent that she takes to task Charles Shannon, the sympathetic (and, not incidentally, left-wing) artist who was Traylor’s patron and advocate for neglecting the work’s powerful social content.

It’s a thrilling notion. One wants to believe, with Sobel, that in some way Traylor’s art constituted street propaganda that helped pave the way for the Montgomery bus boycott. She brings her theories into the realm of possibility with her extensively footnoted research not only into Traylor’s own life — where there are some new facts to be known, if only a few — but also into the much more knowable history of his surrounding community and culture.

Like Kuyk and many other writers on art by southern blacks, Sobel sees powerful African influences at every opportunity, but her attention is really engaged by more immediate influences. She explores not only conjure and the blues, but also the life ways of Traylor’s time and place. For example, she points out that the common practice of using old newspapers as wallpaper enveloped poor southerners in graphical galleries, opening the possibility of such an influence on Traylor himself.

However, Sobel’s excitement at unlocking, or rather debunking, the mystery of Traylor’s art outruns the evidence, and she doesn’t slow down as her arguments become more and more circular: She hypothesizes that Traylor was exposed to conjure culture; she interprets any images that could relate to conjure as doing so; those same images demonstrate that conjure is represented in the art. QED. The loop tightens into the markedly speculative proposition that Traylor was not only familiar with conjure but was a practitioner.

Throughout the book, possible meanings seem to morph with inevitability into authoritative statements of intention and biographical fact. The appearance of triangles and squares, which happen to have special meaning for Masons, puts Traylor into a lodge. His use of common primary colors is freighted with hidden meaning because they have significance both in conjure and in African art. “Simple animals” aren’t just animals but spirit creatures — Haitian, African, anything other than what Traylor may have straightforwardly seen and wanted to represent.

It’s not that there are no deeper meanings there, and Sobel deserves credit for not throwing up her hands at the difficult task of unlocking them. Indeed, in some sense she rescues Traylor from overly innocent readings by recognizing the disturbing content in many of his drawings. His body of work represents more than an old man observing the passing parade, and Sobel’s expositions aren’t less reasonable than seeing nothing more than superficially simple animals and common colors.

But there is a discomfiting disparity between her aggressive interpretations and the extremely circumstantial evidence she uses to back them up. That disparity becomes especially acute as she connects specific drawings with the death of Traylor’s son Will at the hands of Birmingham, Alabama, police in 1929. Construing a pair of crucifixion drawings as lynching narratives makes for a compelling story, but it’s not clear that it does Traylor justice, either as a matter of history or aesthetics. It’s hard not to wonder whether Traylor, despite his humble origins, might have been after something more universal than strictly personal in at least some of his art.

Even when Sobel seems on the firmer ground of historical description she is still prone to slipping into heavy speculation. She is willing to accept as fact Betty Kuyk’s claim that Traylor killed a man, even though Kuyk’s evidence was decades-old, third-hand gossip related by the white owner of the funeral home where Traylor sometimes slept. Sobel goes even further, spinning a narrative that the murder involved the lover of Traylor’s first wife. There is no evidence for this claim at all, however, beyond Sobel’s own reading of imagery in selected drawings.

While any artwork is fair game for interpretation, and Traylor’s cryptic drawings fairly begs for it, one wonders if the lives of artists of more conventional stature — Picasso, say, or Pollack — could respectably serve as fodder for such loosely argued biography. Sobel’s book responds to the reasonable desire to replace the mystery of Traylor’s meaning and motivation with a fully conceived narrative. Believe it if you wish, just don’t confuse her ever more elaborate tale with actual history.

A version of this review originally appeared in Intuit’s Outsider magazine.

This book, also a catalog for an exhibit at the Prinzhorn Collection, is even more focused on psychiatric issues than the Collecting Madness volume.

In an earlier time that could have been problematic, but the success of Dubuffet and his followers in liberating the art from its psychiatric context actually makes it easier to appreciate the insights. Although there is still plenty to debate relating to terminology and the significance of biography, the specifically medical terrain no longer feels like an impediment to aesthetic value.

In this case the medical context is a useful reminder of the pain often associated with these creative exercises, but it also underscores how these works constitute portals into other worlds, albeit wholly interior ones. Fuller understanding of their delusional background makes it even more engrossing to enter these bizarre and distorted worldviews.

The historical and sociological meaning of these materials also adds to their impact. Röske and Brand- Claussen point out that James Tilly Matthews’ schematic representation of the Air Loom — a pneumatic machine that he believed pumped out vapors to control his behavior — constitutes the first documented concept of a mind-control device. Remember that in 1800 the industrial revolution was still in process and the idea of all-powerful machinery was in some ways still novel. What is now a common enough trope in literature, movies and cartoons — equipment that can control a person’s behavior and thoughts — originated in the delusions of paranoid schizophrenics.

Indeed, other more recent fantasies of influencing machines (a psychiatric term for mind-control devices) bring the psychotic and the scientific even closer together. As essayist Verena Kuni points out, in the early years of radio the notion of similarities between radio and brainwaves interested scientists as well as asylum inmates, with experiments attempting to validate whether the brain could be influenced by radio waves. Of course, in our day the notion of direct interfaces between electronic devices (e.g., computers) and brains is no longer relegated to the far side of visionary.

Meanwhile, much of the art shown here is magnificent, though as in Collecting Madness the illustrations are not profuse. The drawings of Joseph Schneller and Robert Gie, not to mention the embroidery of Johanna Natalie Wintsch, are truly art brut masterworks and are well reproduced.

Unfortunately, neither of these books is easy to come by, at least in the United State. You will need to find a European seller online and take the hit on both the exchange rate and the shipping. But they’re both still a bargain compared to two volumes specific to the actual Prinzhorn collection that were published in the U.S. — Beyond Reason, catalog to a traveling exhibit of work from the collection, and Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Prinzhorn’s own monograph. Even in paperback, you will be hard-pressed to find either of these important books for less than $100.