The paintings fill the old house. Resting on shelves and leaning on walls and hanging in every room.

They soothe her, the artist says. She can’t explain it.

She starts to paint. Pink sky. Purple trees. A woman in gray.

The day disappears. The world outside disappears.

“I don’t do it for any reason but just for love,” says Georgia Birch, 43. “There’s a lot of love in them. I don’t know how to explain that.“

Most of the time Georgia doesn’t leave her little frame house.

But eight of her paintings have.

They hang on the walls of the Loft at the Mill, up on the third floor of an old brick building downtown.

All day Monday the art went up.

Georgia’s paintings.

Bonnie Burgeson’s photographs.

Mike Kula’s intense abstract art, broad brushes of color on canvases big as a coffee table.

The second annual Outsider Arts Festival: Artists on the Edge, opens today at 11 a.m.

Every evening through Friday the festival will feature award-winning films. Poets will read Wednesday night.

Dean Settle shows off the work. He directs the Lancaster County Mental Health Center. He loves art.

He loves this art.

He points to a painting, still resting on the painted concrete floor. An off-kilter figure, half bird, half man, his one eye a spiral. Like a Picasso, he says. Or a Miro.

He walks around the corner to a series of three framed faces, long as a man in a freak-house mirror. This is Dave’s work, he says.

And then another. See all the lines? The artist has obsessive compulsive disorder. It’s hard for him to stop.

Three years ago the mental health center director told me about Artists on the Edge, people who lived with mental illness and found solace in art. They met at the F Street Rec Center. Poets and painters and photographers.

Every year since then the groups have attracted more artists. And now this show, in its second year.

“This makes my year,” he says.

Dean is happy to see the recognition the artists receive and deserve. He’s told me stories of art lost inside apartments and hidden under beds.

One of the artists I got to know three years ago won’t be here this year. Nigel is behind the walls of the Regional Center but one of his drawings is on the wall here, a yellow man with an intricate cross growing out of the top of his head.

He drew it while he was in the Crisis Center, Dean says.

He titled it “God.”

Mike Kula knows art has the power to transcend illness.

He got sick in college. Eventually he earned his bachelor of fine arts degree, despite the voices in his head.

“It’s been the main thing that has gotten me through my mental illness,” he explains, helping out Monday morning.

At first he worried about putting his painting s on display, afraid people could read his thoughts through his brush strokes.

Then he thought of Vincent Van Gogh, who was believed to have painted his way out of two hospitalizations.

Mike teaches painting now on occasion at the Artists on the Edge open studio.

And he’s watched the talent emerge. His own 30-minute parody of schizophrenia — “Hysterical Mind” — will be shown three nights this week, part of a rotation of powerful films on mental illness.

Modern Arts Midwest sponsor the show. And Janssen Pharmaceuticals gave the festival a grant to pay for matting and framing and renting projection equipment.

This morning Georgia plans to leave her little house this week and catch a ride to the third floor of an old brick building downtown.

For so many years it’s been so hard to leave her safe space.

But that’s starting to change, she says.

She goes to the coffeehouse down the street now. And after she met Dean she went to visit the open studio.

“As it changes my art has grown. It’s starting to bloom.

“Could you say that? It’s starting to bloom and I really have started to meet a lot of beautiful people.”

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.