The Colorful Apocalypse
Journeys in Outsider Art
- Contents
- Review Quotes

THE FIRST NOTEBOOK
Visions from Paradise
THE SECOND NOTEBOOK
Revelation Theories
THE THIRD NOTEBOOK
Picture-Perfect Jesus
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“In TheColorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms explores the frontier between inspiration and psychosis with the expressive power, the passionate fervor, and the faithfully unflinching honesty for which his work is deservedly known. This book is incisive, startling, and often genuinely moving.”
“If James Agee and Tom Wolfe were to cross their bare wires, the resulting flash would be The Colorful Apocalypse. Greg Bottoms gets us deep inside not just the art, but the making, the visionary angst that drives these outsiders, these unassimilated originals. A savvy, but also deeply heartfelt, intensely searching tribute.”
“Greg Bottoms’s fascination with artists whose work can be considered either visionary—the expression of deep Christian faith—or deranged, fanatical, and morbid, stems in part from his own anguished attempts to understand where sanity and insanity meet. It is his haunting testimony of the search for this unfindable answer that makes The Colorful Apocalypse so refreshing, its essays of discovery so open, attentive, and deeply compelling.”
“In The Colorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms serves his readers as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow did in The Heart of Darkness. The river Bottoms navigates is a flood of outsider art, its heart of darkness a torrent of pain, sorrow, anger, suspicion, and longing. Like Paul on the road to Tarsus, each of the artists Bottoms investigates or interviews has experienced a shattering revelation. The outcomes of their epiphanies are seldom benign: paintings that are hellfire sermons brim with dead babies, Satanic brides, and world-destroying conspiracies. Bottoms is our guide to an art that succeeds in making darkness visible. View this art—read this book—only if you dare.”<Michael Lesy, author of Wisconsin Death Trip>
“Driven by painful memories of a schizophrenic brother who had visions and turned to Christian fundamentalist thinking, Bottoms (Angelhead: My Brother’s Descent into Madness) sought out religious outsider artists, hoping to discover whether artistic expression helps relieve the suffering of visionaries who hover between madness and ecstasy. . . . His poignant book, imbued with troubling thoughts of his brother’s illness and his own uneasiness about his motives in seeking out marginalized artists, ends on a positive note: the creative process does indeed have life-affirming powers.”
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Art: American Art | Art--General Studies
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