Outsider art is definately in. Raw, direct, emotional, the work seems to go back to the beginnings of art, when primal emotions directed the hand of artists trying to fathom their world. Who are these artists who do this work ignoring formal training and mainstream art world conventions? How did their work come to be an art-world phenomenon? Stamford native Dan Prince, painter, sculptor, muralist, art dealer and devout nonconformist, has explored these questions in his recently released book, "Passing in the Outsider Lane" (Journey Editions. 1995), a look at the work of 21 outsider artists. British art historian Roger Cardinal first coined the term "outsiders," in his book "Outsider Art" (Praeger, 1972). "The art shall be innocent of pictorial influences and perfectly untutored," Cardinal wrote. "(The artist) shall be socially nonconformist, even to the point of diverging violently from the psychological norm, and he shall not cater to the public." Prince was following such outsider pathways long before Cardinal penned his description. Calling himself "a true rebel with a Dada twist," he says he found himself drawn to art as a child of 10, when he made his own way to New York's Museum of Modern Art. Now he has a studio in the decidedly nonconformist Stamford Loft Artists warehouse complex, packed to the ceiling with art and books In this setting, he sat for an interview to share his passion. "I decided that day at MOMA that I was an artist, right off the bat," he says. "But I didn't want to do run-of-the-mill art. I've never studied art or writing. I thought that would ruin my personalized form of expression." Such an attitude is characteristic of outsider artists. They have their own conceptions, they don't want to be taught and most of them don't care what the "inside" art world thinks of them, Prince explains. "They view their art in terms of emotion in terms of stories they tell me, related to their personal experience. And that's how I write about them in the book, about what moves these artists and why we react to their work." "Passing in the Outsider Lane" is a compilation of touching stories of personal triumph against physical handicaps, emotional illness and other of life's adversities, interspersed with wildly humorous touches. There's Karolina Danek, a Polish immigrant living in Maine, who bought what she calls a "castle full of gems" - a dealer's lot of junk jew elry - to adorn her paintings because her dream had always been to exhibit her spiritual paintings in a Crystal Palace. There's Randy Toy, who dwells in the hills of Tennessee and uses folk tales to narrate his genre paintings of local legends. And there's Homer Green, another Tennessee mountain-dweller, who tells Prince "he doesn't give a damn" when Prince compliments him on a new carving.

Prince began writing about outsider art while studying medieval English and history at Vanderbilt University (Vice President Al Gore was in his graduating class) in
Nashville, Tenn. He wrote for the Nashville Tennessean newspaper and Versus magazine. When he went on to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate work, his thesis adviser
rejected his plan to write about environmental folk sculptor Enoch Tanner Wickham. "He didn't think the subject sophisticated enough and criticized my approach as 'experientially
dynamic, not behaviorally patterned' " Prince recalls. In September 1975*, Prince quit grad school and went on to immerse himself in "self-taught" artwork, both his own and that of others. He writes with a clear, direct style that belies his extensive knowledge of art history and theory. 'To put forth some academic theory is not my idea of how to portray what these artists are doing,' he says. "Any time I start to pontificate or get outside the situation, it sounds false." "Passing in the Outsider lane" was conceived in the wake of the Northridge earthquake in Santa Monica, where Prince now lives and works part of the year. His gallery was reduced to rubble and he was struggling to move 1,000 pieces of
artwork when Peter Ackroyd, publisher of Journey Editions, arrived. Recounts Prince: "He had been recommended by actor Martin Mull who had been to a show I had done in Los Angeles. Ackroyd found me in the parking lot, giving a pep talk to my assistants. I must have been quite a sight when he caught me doing my little Napoleon act." That day, the book was born.
Prince says he judges the validity of self-taught art based on the verification, in a visual form, that the artist's expression is rendered directly from the brain - without the mediating effects of technique, Conscious preparation and without any calculation about future critique, sales or any other motivations relating to the mainstream art world. 'The self- taught artist is digging deep into the basis of human sight and communication.... there are definable reasons that the work is so moving:' he says.
The bond between the artists and Prince often turns into lasting friend- ship. For example, Prince says he is quite close with Larry Armistead of Cos Cob, whom he met at the Stamford Festival for the Arts, where Armistead was manning a booth in the community service tent for the Greenwich Stroke Center. After recovering from a massive stroke, Armistead became involved with art therapy.
Armistead works as a team with his wife, Essie, who, Prince says, describes her husband as an incredible taskmaster. 'When Larry is painting, it is an artistic moment. He's an artist and he's not shy about his pre- rogatives:' says Prince. "Without Essie's absolute devotion, Larry would not have made it."
Prince relates the story of how Arrnistead helped him with the 1S foot-by-78-foot mural 'The Sight of Music" in Starnford. The mural runs along the outside wall of the Amadeus restaurant behind the Palace Theater. The panels, each four plywood sheets wide, depict classic artists Mozart and Beethoven as well as jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Walker and Lester Young. "When we hung the mural," Prince notes, "Larry just about paced holes in the parking lot, telling people, 'That's mine'."
"He paints because he wants to communicate" writes Prince of Armistead in 'Passing in the Outsider Lane." "He wants to leave his mark and is well aware that time is fleeting and life, precarious. The art is an enhancement of his life, but also a fight against lethargy and death." John Jordan started doing his artwork again shortly after his wife's
death in 1987. The Stamford resident's first attempt at art was at age 7, when he fashioned a toy railroad engine out of scrap metal. For most of his life, his floor-finishing business and his art fought for his time. Now retired, he is putting all his efforts into his first love and recentIy exhibited at a college gallery outside Boston.
A powerful sculptor and painter, Jordan does work that ranges from strongly influenced African American works to found-art assemblages. "Madame Walker ' a mixed-media work, is a particularly powerful piece incorporating elements that narrate the life of Madame Walker, a forrner domestic worker who invented hair-straightening. When asked whether his work has a having cultural relation to Africa, Jordan rephes, "Hey, man, everyone looks at National Geographic." Prince's recent whirlwind book promotion tour took him to Pittsfield, Mass., where one of the artists in the book, Ray Librizzi, lives and paints.
Librizzi's life has seen ups and downs, from selling newspapers on the street as a noun lad and being expelled from school in eighth grade to a four-year existence as hobo. He resumed to Pittsfield at age 18 to finish high school and went on to finish college at Williams, the first person in his Sicilian immigran family to do so. The Depression years saw him selling classified ads for the New York Times, then freelancing as a writer and doing radio broadcasts in the late 1940s.  As Librizzi wrote by instinct, so does he paint "Ray speaks from the street, the sewer, the college and the saloon," writes Prince, 'from riding blind baggage in America, to travelling overseas as a foreign correspondent." Prince, who has started a non-profit organization called STAR (Self-Taught Artists Rescources) to help outsider artists, tells these stories with compassion, understanding and appreciation of the art and the
artists' lives. His two-page dedication ends with gratitude "to all the self-taught artists I know and have learned from, and who I hope to make the topics of future books...Refuse to Lose!"