How to Look at Outsider Art by Lyle Rexer catalogue essay When is restriction a form of liberation?
For Pearl Blauvelt, the very narrowness of her world, limited to the shop where she worked, the house where she lived in western Pennsylvania, and a handful of scenes from her immediate purview, apparently gave her all she needed to inspire a detailed, painstaking, and faithful inventory of the contents of daily life. She might be thought of as a female James Castle (1900-1977), the self-taught artist from rural Idaho born deaf and mute, who meticulously rendered all the houses he lived in. The mystery of drawings like these is that they seem to arise out of two simultaneous and diametrically opposed impulses: a tentativeness in the face of life, which encourages one to make the bond with reality a bit more secure and intimate, and the small pleasure of simply being here and showing it – drawing as a kind of existential tinkering. Yet Blauvelt has something else, a draftsman’s determination to get the picture right, complete, and precise. In drawing after drawing, she works out spatial
