‘Outsider Art’ in Inistioge

IN 1978, an Irishman and an Englishman met jostling for a painting at a London auction. After the Englishman – art dealer Paul Conran – closed the deal, the Irishman offered to buy it from him and supply a quick profit. Conran declined, knowing he could get a better markup on his savvy purchase, but the two stayed in touch.

Years later, on a visit to the Irishman’s home in the Kilkenny countryside, Conran was perusing the newspaper after lunch and saw a charming house for sale – a ruin with trees growing through it. Like the painting, the house was a bargain, and Conran placed his bid.

He was to become neighbours with the Oberlins, an eccentric Irish-American family who moved to Ireland in 1998. Virginia Oberlin and her two adult daughters Maureen and Kielty live in Inistioge village, where their attention is divided between their guesthouse and a demanding flock of chickens.

As fellow outsiders in the town, Conran and the Oberlins developed a friendship. Conran eventually became acquainted with Maureen Oberlin’s art practice – reams of human portraits drawn in charcoal – and he volunteered to represent her.

Maureen was born with cerebral palsy and finds verbal communication challenging. “We can all express ourselves in many more ways than Maureen can,” said Conran, “and this is a way she’s found to express herself.” Maureen concurred, adding that “words are very [difficult]. It doesn’t come very easily, verbal stuff.”

Nevertheless, Maureen does not view her disability as a major facet of her identity, putting it fourth, in fact, after: ‘a human being’, an artist, and an American. “Honestly, I would have drawn whether I was disabled or not,” she said. “I know that for a fact.”

Maureen’s mother Virginia recalled that Maureen’s proclivity for art began at a young age. Maureen’s father was in the military, and the family made many moves within and outside the United States, including to New Orleans, Louisiana, where Maureen was born. “In the process of moves," said Virginia, “it’s really hard to keep track of charcoals and crayons and pens and pencils – I mean, you’re looking out for the big stuff. Things would kind of get swept away, a lot of their art work. When you move that much, you end up discarding things. So somewhere in that timeframe, she would have started... five, six, seven. And the stuff was really good.”

Asked if she had ever thought to exhibit her work growing up, Maureen said: “It was a thought, but that was let go for a while.” She explained that she attended an informal arts class in Graiguenamanagh, but otherwise has no artistic training.

“Maureen just started doing it,” said her sister Kielty, “and we live with her, we’re like: there she goes again. And you can tell she’s doing it, because she gets quiet, and then, little by little, she’s [covered in charcoal],” she laughed. “But it took Paul coming in for us to take a look at it.”

Conran spent his career in London and New York, specialising in surrealism and 20th-century art. During this time, he became cognisant of the ‘outsider art’ movement, which platformed artists working outside mainstream art institutions.

Today, outsider art is arguably a mainstream institution in itself, and the Outsider Art Fair in New York City – “the premier fair dedicated to Self-Taught Art, Art Brut, and Outsider Art” – attracts crowds of observers every March.

Conran emphasised that he is not an expert on outsider art, but he understands an outsider artist as someone who is “not remotely interested in anything other than the activity of drawing. They’re not interested in who’s going to like it, who’s going to not like it, whether it’s going to be sold, whether it’s not going to be sold, whether it’s going to achieve critical acclaim or not.”

Conran views Maureen’s work as part of this phenomenon because “she’s not creating with the express aim of having an exhibition in a public space.”

Still, Conran acknowledges the contradictions of the outsider movement, which has become a contentious corner of the art world: “It's drawing people's attention to the fact that there are people out there who love to draw, and they're not part of the commercial art world. Although to get them in front of the public, they sort of have to become part of the commercial world. And, of course, the New York Outsider Art Fair is a huge commercial exercise.
So there is a contradiction there. But the contradiction is in the business, not in the creativity.

“There are artists who go into the business because they know they can make a ton of money from it, and then there are artists who enjoy painting and are picked up, and then they make it their career. And then there are people – I hesitate to call them artists – who just express themselves by creating images. That’s how Maureen fits into the whole picture. Just somebody who loves to do it, for the sake of it.”

“When you look at [Maureen’s portraits] you can see an expression, you can see an emotion, and oftentimes you see somebody you know, and that’s what I love about them,” said Kielty, admiring her sister’s pieces. “The subtlety somebody has, a look in their eye; she captures it, in a way that I wouldn’t have noticed it in the actual face until I looked at her work.”

Kielty recalled that she once asked Maureen to depict her and was disappointed to discover an unflattering resemblance to “the Chucky Doll.” Maureen politely consoled her sister – “you’re very negative about yourself!” – but gave no indication of renouncing the portrait.

Maureen has exhibited for the past four years at the Thomastown Creative Arts Festival, which Conran explained has become somewhat of an outpost for visual arts during the Kilkenny Arts Festival. At her first show, Maureen took in €1,000 and bought her mother a new oven.

After working with Conran, Maureen has become interested in outsider art and is an admirer of Madge Gill, a self-taught British artist famed for her intricate black-and-white illustrations.

Maureen’s aspiration is that, one day, she might stage a homecoming to exhibit her cast of charcoal portraits at the Outsider Art Fair in New York.

Maureen Oberlin is exhibiting at Thomastown Creative Arts Festival August 7-16.