James Hampton’s “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly” is, literally speaking, a giant pile of garbage. Constructed of old furniture, foil wrappers, empty jars and bits of paper, Hampton constructed the piece in a Washington D.C. garage in the fourteen years preceding his death from various objects he collected while working as a street cleaner.

However, if you get the opportunity to see it in person, you’d think it was the finest collection of holy relics this side of the Atlantic.

Its immensity and the power of its glow left me breathless. That experience, along with engaging with outsider art as a whole, profoundly changed the way I view creative expression and my own work.

What is outsider art? Outsider art is less of a specific style and more of a grouping of certain artists whose works were created outside of the traditional art world. They were typically untrained, often suffered from mental illness or severe trauma, and used styles and forms that radically contrast with contemporary art.

I discovered outsider art while down some Wikipedia rabbit-hole a few years ago and instantly developed a bit of an obsession with the genre. I was really struggling with depression at the time and seeing how these individuals found an escape from their reality through art, liberated from any need or desire to impress those around them.

I was, at one time, a creative child, like most. I wrote fantasy stories, drew pictures of superheroes and made stick figure animations. It was one of the main ways I blew off steam as a child. However, as I grew into adolescence, I became deeply self-critical of my work, and my natural desire to create withered.

The content I consumed online didn’t help. The mid-to-late 2010s internet culture saw the rise of “cringe content” to mass success. I watched hours of sniveling commentary, YouTubers dissecting children’s songs, artwork and other creations, degrading the work and lambasting the child creator.

I began to hate that natural creative impulse within myself. I looked back on my old Wattpad stories with disgust. I deleted my old accounts, wiped my Minecraft worlds and damned my colored pencils to the bottom drawer of my desk.

This outsider art, however, stood in an entirely different dimension from this “cringe culture.” These artists created their works uncaring of those who would view them, driven purely by a need to give form to the images in their minds.

I particularly fell in love with the works of Nikolai Pirosmani. Pirosmani was a Georgian painter who lived in poverty while working as a sign painter near the city of Tbilisi. His works focus on rustic scenes from his surroundings, with a specific focus on animals and everyday Georgian people.

I first discovered him through his paintings of deer. Their fur is composed of soft brushstrokes, and their eyes are large and innocent looking. These scenes feel serene, even dreamlike, especially his 1913 work, where the deer stands in front of a hazy backdrop of a bush and mountains. Contrast these paintings with his “Black Lion,” a painting which genuinely unsettled me the first time I saw it. Its frame takes up most of the painting, its fur is made of thick, less refined brushstrokes, and the work is cloaked in darkness save for the lion’s two piercing eyes.

Pirosmani’s work is not detailed. His style is hard to describe, deeply rooted in traditional Georgian art yet stylistically distinct from any contemporary work. Its power, instead, comes from its complete emotional authenticity and honesty.

For so long, I placed my works in comparison to titans. I felt that if I couldn’t achieve a high artistic vision, if I couldn’t get every feature on a face accurately placed, or if the fingers on a hand weren’t the perfect length, then it was pointless to create. Outsider art taught me that great technique, fine detail and high-quality material, while serving as the foundation of many masterpieces, are all fundamentally unnecessary to create a deeply moving, powerful work.

Therefore, reader, I encourage you to look into outsider art. Allow your inner creative energy out, in whatever form it may come. If you haven’t drawn in a while, try it again. If you were toying around with a jingle in your head, even if you aren’t trained in music or can’t play an instrument, sing it to a friend.

Too often, we are trained as a society to very carefully manage how we express ourselves to those around us. Become like the outsider artist: liberate yourself from the inhibitions of imagined judgement. Silence the critic in your head and pursue only your vision as clearly as you can.

Gordon Crawford is a 19-year-old political science major from Gonzales, La.