Contributed photo by Jeane Bice Cheryl Korb’s gifts become obvious, detail by detail. A local Pennsylvania artist, she lives on the farm where she was born, painting with single-hair brushes. (Click for larger image)

Outsider Art brings visions weird and wonderful to Narrowsburg

A review by JEANE BICE

NARROWSBURG, NY — The artworks currently on exhibit at The River Gallery offer many a tale of intrigue from the lives of the artists who created them. As if woven from the yarn of Agatha Christie, these disparate talents have traveled through time and circumstance to converge right here.

This is Outsider Art, so named because the artists are self-taught, each with a vision quite apart from any established mainstream. They are self-invented mavericks, eccentrics, and loners of self-expression. Their bravery is made obvious by technical daring and often haunting originality.

For example, Austrian Josef Donhauser pledged his life to paintings of religious humility after escaping a death sentence under Hitler.

Joseph Garlock, a Czarist escapee born in a Russian village in 1884, left us a trove of visionary treasures that wound up in a shed behind his daughter’s house in nearby Woodstock.

Closer to home, Cheryl Korb lives on the northeastern Pennsylvania farm where she was born and taught herself to paint. Her meticulously detailed paintings of rural settings—she paints with brushes constructed of only one hair—are bewitched with charm and light.

David Tinsley, another Pennsylvania resident, paints graphic images at once primitive and sophisticated, and touched with startling mystery.

There is much more.

Outside Art from the inside:
Chicano prisoner art

	Contributed photo by Jeane Bice Chicano Prison Art has been rendered on the only medium available to the artists/inmates: white cotton handkerchiefs sketched in ballpoint and felt-tip pen. (Click for larger image)

Lacking canvas for their art, Chicano inmates of Texas’ prison system applied their talents to white cotton handkerchiefs. Their powerful renderings are done in ballpoint pen. Numerous handkerchiefs pinned to the wall depict hard lives doing hard time. They may be conversation pieces, but they are plainly gifted expressions of high caliber.

How ever did such diverse talents come to light in once place?

Barbara Braathen, owner of The River Gallery, explained, “It’s not serendipitous that many of these artists intersect with Narrowsburg. The focus of the River Gallery has always been to showcase local artists, and then to amplify them with work from my own collection as well as work from New York City and elsewhere.”

A passion for paintings followed Ms. Braathen to Narrowsburg after twenty years of gallery ownership in New York City.

“And so,” she added, “Cheryl Korb, David Tinsley and Wolfgang Oehrling live or have lived in the area. Josef Donhauser was collected by someone in the area, while the Chicano prison artists and others are represented in New York City.”

By definition, Outsider Art defies any trend or genre. Yet collectively, this show is unified by a clear celebration of independent spirit. Never mind the favored tastes of passing cognoscenti. One feels, with a certain poignancy and quiet admiration, the power and singularity of these artists. Their only influence has been the journey of their lives and the courage of some private faith.

A reception will be held on August 2 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at The River Gallery on Main Street.