John Devlin’s second act, from outsider to world star The local artist is acclaimed for drawing utopia, but can’t imagine a better city than this one. John Devlin doesn’t draw for other people. He doesn’t draw for museums or galleries (even though, right now, his work is hanging in New York’s American Folk Art Museum, Berlin’s Galerie Parterre Berlin and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia). He doesn’t even do it for the agents in London and Paris who represent his work. Nope, the self-taught, “outsider artist” (a title bestowed on Devlin by the late mixed-media artist Cliff Eyland, who made the giant art installation behind the Halifax Central Library’s circulation desk) is motivated by the purest of intentions. “The bottom line is, I'm face-to-face with a blank sheet of paper, alone in my room, and I have to put something on that paper. And to me, to be able to continue to come up with ideas for new works: That, for me, is the bottom line. That’s the greatest pleasure,” Devlin says, speaking by phone with The Coast one recent spring morning.