William Kurelek was an outsider artist: he had the mental illness, the geographical isolation, the ethnic worries, the religious obsessiveness, and the monastic, heremtic strangeness expected of people reclaimed as art brut after death. William Kurelek was an insider artist, he was collected by governments, musuems, corperate collections and the industrial elite, his gallerist was among the most famous in Canada, and he was cunning in matters of personae, cash flow, and networking. His work is both cloying and visionary, rural nostalgia and apocolyptic terror, tender and daring. Thinking about the tensions and delicacies of the negotions, and the ambigous efect, 30 years after his death, is to question the very core of outsider status. Writing about this ambigiuty, i am hoping to return him to his proper status: the most important religiosu painter of the 20th century (with the possible exception of Stephen Spenser), and the most improtant canadian artist since Kreigoff.