As someone who normally spends his days analyzing the nuances of cat behavior patterns and whisker positioning, my recent visit to the Outsider Art Fair in New York has provided a refreshing perspective on creativity that exists beyond traditional boundaries.
Art Brute vs. Outsider Art
The French word for “raw art,” Art Brute refers to creative works produced by non-professionals who work outside of aesthetic norms, especially those produced by mental illness, prisoners and other social outsiders. The term was coined in 1945 by French artist Jean De Buffett. He was fascinated by art created outside of formal training and cultural influence.
Outsider art emerged as a broader, English equivalent, including art bruts, but expanded to include self-taught artists, folk artists and visionaries without formal training, regardless of social status or mental status. While Art Brut maintains stricter standards for the isolation of creators from mainstream culture, outsider art embraces a broader spectrum of unconventional creators.
I was first fascinated while visiting Collections des Art Bruts in Lausanne, Switzerland many years ago, and founded by Dabafett in 1976, appearing as a definitive museum dedicated to the genre.
With over 70,000 homes and work by over 1,000 creators, the facility preserves Dubuffet’s original vision by showing off art created by individuals who work completely outside of established artistic traditions and cultural influences. The museum remains an outstanding global center for studying and experiencing authentic art brutes, as defined by Dubuffet.
Luckily, like in New York, there is an outsider art fair on the other side of the pond.
Every time I leave Grand Central Station, I love the mix of architecture.
Outsider Art Fairnow in its 32nd year, he continues to showcase work by self-taught artists who create formal training, institutional verification, or without concern about established artistic norms.
These creators work from pure instincts and needs. This is a creative approach that cat behaviorists essentially recognize as a fundamentally feline profession.
What immediately struck me was the image of animals, particularly cats and dogs, through the exhibition. Unlike the refined, anatomically perfect renderings found in mainstream galleries, these depictions captured something more important about our companion animals.
The raw, unfiltered depictions of dogs and cats with exaggerated eyes, elongated bodies, and sometimes supernatural qualities consider seeing us in cat behavioral studies express the mystical essence that we seek to record through scientific observations.
I was particularly drawn to the work of a friend of English illustrator Allison. Its presence at the fair was a fascinating crossover between commercial illustration and outsider sensibilities.
I wasn’t the only one who was fascinated by her work. Almost every piece on display sold for $1,400 pop. She is scheduled to hold a solo NYC show in November.
A stylized cat of friends with round emotional eyes and exaggerated proportions brings out the primitive nature of cat charm. Although formally trained, her work maintains the essential outsider quality of emotional directness. Her cat has the eerie ability to communicate complex emotional states through minimalist traits. This was observed in actual cats that could communicate volumes through slight tail convulsions and pupil dilation.
The work of friends shows how the line between trained and intuitive art is blurred when the subject demands emotional authenticity over technical accuracy.
The result is an anthropomorphic whim with a mind that can relate to all pet owners.
In contrast to the friendly style of friends, New York’s unique Jacob Gerald features his densely mixed-media work with dog and cat shapes that emerge from the chaotic urban landscape. Starting to create art while living in a car with a rescue dog, Gerald produces works that capture hypersensitive sensory experiences familiar to those studying cats’ neurological responses to environmental stress.
His repetitive motif of cats resonates with my research on how to keep cats on impossible shelves, wide-eyed, wary of vigilance, and how domestic cats can maintain evolutionary vigilance even in safe environments. Gerald’s untrained approach allows him to capture the tension between domesticity and the wild that defines the cat’s experience.
One artist, a former postal worker in the countryside of Georgia, has been reduced to a series of folk paintings depicting cats as the spirit of guardians, whose bodies are elongated and their eyes are reduced to an extended student who observes with cats during hypnotism cultivation hours.
The neurological foundations of these outsider artists’ creativity reflect what they observe in cats while playing. Both engage in action without external reward structures driven by internal needs and pure pleasures of expression.
Several artists with developmental differences have created complex and repetitive patterns that remind us of the exact practising behavior that cats display when they display during content.
Most fascinating was the job of an elderly woman who began drawing after caring for a colony of wild cats. Her canvas depicts multicolored cat shapes intertwined with complex social arrangements, capturing the subtle hierarchical structures I have documented in my research on multicat households. Her untrained eyes documented the nuances of cat body language, which required years of scientific observation to recognize.
Unlike commercial polishes in mainstream art markets, the Outsider Art Fair maintains reliability and directness. There is no pretense or artificial refinement. Whether it is the forced creation or the urge to suddenly run across the living room at 3am, there is no raw expression of internal experience.
Outsider art for me is an experience from the ultimate box. What do you think?
