ABSTRACT
Artists were chosen for study because they appeared to subscribe to values and embrace a way of life which placed them off-centre in a routinized, bureaucratic and industrialized world. When they gave up careers as teachers, clerks and mechanics they turned their back on society. The private world stands in contrast to the individual’s ‘bewildering involvements with the worlds of public institutions’; it is a carefully constructed centre which provides ‘an order of integrative and sustained meanings’. A number of artists living in and around a northern industrial town were interviewed in 1974 and 1975. Contacts were made through galleries and by one artist providing an introduction to another. Although they were therefore in some sense a network, they were not a close ‘circle’, and some had very little contact with or knowledge of the others. The artists who were interviewed had a lively sense of being different, but it was a superior difference.
