Pearl Blauvelt

1893-1987 · Northeastern Pennsylvania, USA

Decades after she left, renovators of an abandoned Pennsylvania house opened a wooden box and found around eight hundred pencil drawings: a complete mail-order world by a woman the village had called a witch.

The life

Blauvelt was born in 1893 and lived alone in a small house in northeastern Pennsylvania with no running water, plumbing or central heating, known to unkind neighbours as the Village Witch. Through the 1940s and 50s she drew constantly in school notebooks. In the mid 1950s she was declared incompetent and moved to a care facility, where she lived until her death in Scranton in 1987. Her house stood empty for decades, until new owners restoring it found the box of drawings under the abandoned piles, and her work entered the outsider art canon.

The work

Graphite and coloured pencil on ruled notebook paper: houses drawn transparent as if x-rayed, perspective reversed and scale skewed into a kind of homespun cubism. She copied and catalogued the world of the mail-order catalogue, furniture, stockings, dresses, banknotes, horse-drawn carriages and railway tracks, labelling every single object in her own hand. Her estate is represented by Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York, and work is held in the abcd art brut collection.

Why we love them

She priced up the world she was never given, item by item, in coloured pencil. The inventory outlived everyone who laughed.

Go deeper

• Pearl Blauvelt at the Outsider Art Fair
• Andrew Edlin Gallery
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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