How I see him ..

The movie we watched on Henry Darger defiantly caught me a little off guard, but I’m sure anyone who never heard of him and watched this would feel the same way. I wouldn’t say that he was mentally ill, but more like one of a kind. He was a man who had faced a lot of diversity in his early years, and never really had anyone around to talk to about his feelings so he expressed himself on paper. Along with not having much of a social life, he expressed his feelings in his own way using the characters he did in his fifteen thousand page story.

The few people that he socialized with accepted him, but they didn’t know anything that was going on behind the closed doors of his apartment until he was moved into the poor house. They treated him good, and he was lucky to have such a nice landlord and neighbor that were willing to help him, especially in his older days. He acted strange toward the world, but I feel as though he didn’t know any better. Some of his characters in his story were messed up to say the least and some of the stories he told people were different, but like I said, he never had the experience of a normal life, and he never had anyone to look up to, to learn from.

I feel that Henry was a very creative man. Although he copied images, he made them him own and even more recreated them. He told the story about things that were happening in the world and added to them. We should definitely care about the art he created because it was a memory of a very creative man who was different and wanted to tell a story even though he never thought it would get out to the entire world.