Sketch Book for the Artist

ABSTRACT

LINES

Chants and Prayers

WHEN ABSTRACT LINES are organized in repetition, they

make a visual and physical echo that touches some deep

part of the human spirit. This takes a form in most cultures.

Visually, it is found in the regularity of ordered lines or a

pattern. In music it can be felt in the diversity of plainsong

and African drumming, for example. These photographs

document the meditative drawings of two women living

worlds apart in different countries, cultures, centuries, and

circumstances. In the late 19th century, Marie Lieb was a

psychiatric patient in the Heidelberg Asylum, Germany. She

tore cloth into strips and used these to draw patterns and

symbols on her cell floor. Opposite, an anonymous woman

in the southeast Indian state of Tamil Nadu makes a ritual

drawing on the brick courtyard of her home, dipping her

fingers into a pot of rice flour. It will protect the place from

evil and make a pleasing invitation to good spirits.

MARIE LIEB

Little is known of this woman for whom the act

of drawing was essential. Lieb is one of countless

thousands of "Outsider" artists—diverse individuals

including ordinary citizens, social outcasts, and

sufferers of psychiatric illnesses—who have always

existed, making objects and images outside of

mainstream culture.

Torn cloth This is one of two published photographs showing

Marie Leib's torn cloth strips significantly placed on her cell

floor. Cloth is the simple instrument with which she has

conducted and ordered her universe. Compositional rightness

(see pp.228-29) has been adjusted with each movement

of the rags to draw a cosmos of balance and perfection.

Cell Floor With Torn Strips of Cloth

1894

MARIE LIEB