Morris Hirshfield was a self-taught artist of great and near-painful meticulousness. Every mark he made seemed to be accompanied by a projecting tongue and a small groan of inward satisfaction.

Like many other outsider artists, he chose subjects that any long-trained insider artist would have thought entirely appropriate, too: nudes, still lifes, landscapes, for example. His work seems to exist in parallel with high culture's more familiar norms, seemingly within reach of them, but never quite touching. It exists out on its own, perfectly self-sufficient, within a self-generated world of playful and dream-like fantasy.