To Dubuffet, any Art Brut artist that sold their work to the public betrayed the very essence of Art Brut. Dubuffet swiftly removed any of the offending artist's works that were in his collection, banning them for life.

Mikael Lovich is one of the premier American Outsider Art (Art Brut) artists living today.

True to Dubuffet's belief that Art Brut artists create their art for themselves, Mikael's insatiable need to draw and paint began at a very young age. But, unlike most Art Brut artists whose works only reflected their troubled and traumatic pasts, Mikael used his art as a tremendous tool for his own inner healing.

Mikael was born in the slums of Detroit in 1940. At four years of age, Mikael accidentally pushed his 5-year-old brother, John, off the porch causing a serious head injury. Later that night, John died of a cerebral hemorrhage lying in bed next to Mikael.

Mikael's parents never forgave him for killing his brother. They inflicted severe mental, emotional, physical and sexual abuse on him throughout his childhood and adolescent years.

It was soon after his brother's death that Mikael spontaneously began drawing as a way of expressing his deepening depression.

Desperate to escape the intolerable violence of his home and school, as well as his growing drug and alcohol abuse, Mikael joined the U.S. Army. Instead of bringing stability or relief, the nightmare continued.

Mikael narrowly escaped death on three occasions during his military training. His instability deepened when he was given mind-altering drugs without his knowledge or consent during army experiments. Mikael spiraled into even deeper psychosis. He was soon discharged from the army on 100% disability as a paranoid-schizophenic suffering from extreme post-traumatic-syndrome.

Throughout these years, Mikael continued to draw and paint. His pieces were mostly dark and disturbing — what he called, "scribbles" with ghostly figures lurking within blackened backgrounds. In Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1972, renown Art Brut/Outsider Artist Jacques Karamanoukian acquired some of Mikael's artwork and began displaying them as pure Art Brut in local galleries and bookstores. After a bitter failed marriage, Mikael left Michigan to join the Hari Krishna ashram in West Virginia. It was at the ashram that Mikael, wanting to symbolically put his anguished past behind him, burned all of his artwork. Mikael did not draw or paint again for over twenty years. All the while, Karamanoukian continued to display Mikael's artwork. Not just in the Ann Arbor galleries and The Zeitgeist Gallery in Detroit, Michigan, but in the very hub of Art Brut — the galleries and museums of Paris, France.

"No Love For Martin - Anger" "Visions et Creations dissidents" - Paris, France

Karamanoukian exhibited Mikael's works at the La Boucherie and Art Tisane exhibits in Paris, Le Musée de la Création Franche during the "Visions et Creations Dissidents" exhibit, the "Dionysos a Paris: Outsiders, Métèques et Exilés" and at the Galerie Halle Saint-Pierre á Paris in the summers of 1999 and 2000.

Mikael met his future wife, Marie, also an artist, who encouraged him to use his incredible talent not just to express his pain... but as a means of healing the pain. Mikael began to use the very art form that laid bare his madness to pull himself out of the depths of mental illness and into the realm of self-discovery and spiritual growth.

The most obvious change in his art was his decision to now utilize color in expressing his inner-most feelings. And, the occasional smiling figures, especially his wife, Marie.

What's remarkable is that Mikael transformed this highly controversial art form into a tool for self-exploration and discovery. Whereas Art Brut began as the desperate scribblings of the institutionalized or extremely isolated, Mikael utilized it as a powerful instrument of healing.

The art works in this gallery are not just a collection of drawings of a paranoid schizophrenic, but a diary of a man's torturous struggle from the depths of insanity to self-encounter and finally, spiritual growth.