Catherine Garrigue
Born 1954, Paris
Catherine Garrigue’s drawings are more than visual expressions; they are portals to invisible realms, reflecting personal explorations within herself. Now in her early seventies, Garrigue has enjoyed a lifelong passion for art that continues to evolve. After years of keeping her work private, the encouragement of her family has brought her drawings into the public eye, allowing us a glimpse into her mysterious, creative world.
Garrigue studied art history at the Faculty of Tolbiac and simultaneously pursued practical training in sculpture and pottery. She studied under Marcel Mahu, a sculptor at the Maison des Artistes, and Monique Rech, who taught her pottery at the Atelier du Cru et du Cuit. She opened her own modelling studio in 1996, first in Paris and then in Périgord. There, she combined teaching with her own artistic practice, exhibiting at prominent venues such as the Salon des Indépendants and Les Journées de la Céramique.
Throughout this period of working three dimensionally, Garrigue always maintained a drawing practice which in 2011 underwent a remarkable transformation after the devastation of a family death. The deeply felt loss opened a doorway to a new form of creativity, leading Garrigue on a journey of discovery and healing through altered states of dreaming, deep thinking and meditation, where she encountered invisible realms embedded in her unconscious. It was these ‘mind visions’ that became the sole focus of her artmaking.
Initially, Garrigue began drawing spontaneous designs, letting go of any preconceived intentions or aesthetic goals. She credits her ability to quickly master the automatic drawing technique to her experience with the gestural hand movements used in sculpting clay. Through this unorthodox method, she sought to release an authentic voice from her unconscious, a process that became a form of catharsis. She recalls, “Little by little, I got caught up in the game with these scribbles which entertained and surprised me”. This intuitive practice soon developed into a daily routine, one that provided psychological balance and comfort.
Garrigue describes her drawing process as akin to being a flâneuse, a wanderer, in the metropolis of her mind. Through these introspective peregrinations, she encounters whispers, shadowy spirits and visions which she feels nourish her life. It is a creative process that draws comparisons to other visionary artists such as Marguerite Burnat-Provins, who called her own visionary drawings “my city.” Garrigue lives alone and relishes the quietude conducive for entering a state of deep concentration. Occasionally, she chooses classical music to accompany her, but more often it is the silence that is the conductor of her personal opera. In these moments, time loses all meaning and her hand becomes an instrument guided by an inner force, perhaps, as she suggests, by her doppelganger, her other self.
Garrigue believes that our senses perceive only a small fraction of reality. “I think that our gaze only perceives a tiny part of what surrounds us,” she says, noting that forces beyond our understanding influence our world. In her drawings, she visualises these invisible forces and the metaphysical realms they inhabit. Her compositions gradually build up to reveal otherworldly buildings, birds, flowers, faces with closed eyes and spirits shrouded in ectoplasmic plumes. These figures, which include self-portraits, reflect a movement away from the physical and into the spiritual, exploring the space between life and death – a liminal space where words are not necessary and communication achieved by the transmission of thoughts alone. For Garrigue, these enigmatic drawings uncover autobiographical details and, on occasion, past traumas which she describes as coming from “the attic of my memory, shedding light on my consciousness or, more precisely, my soul”.
Her motivation for creating remains deeply personal, seeing herself not as an artist, but as a créatrice, someone who draws inspiration from within rather than from the outside world. “For me, there’s the aspect of art on one hand, and creation on the other,” she explains. “The artist draws inspiration from the outside world. The creator draws from their own inner landscapes, which become the foundation of their universe.” This distinction between artist and creator is crucial to Garrigue’s understanding of her work and places her alongside practitioners of mediumistic art, such as Augustin Lesage and Laure Pigeon, who inspire her focus on introspection.
The themes in Garrigue’s drawings emerge subconsciously, forming chapters in what she describes as a psychological process beyond her control. Each theme unfolds over weeks or months until it reaches its natural completion. A single drawing can take anywhere from three to ten days to complete, with Garrigue working for five to six hours a day. The materials and colour palettes vary according to the theme. For example, her Dream series is rendered in monochromatic blue ink on kraft paper, symbolising a numinous or oneiric mystery, while her Memento Mori works are drawn in black ink, and the kaleidoscopic bursts of her Flowers with coloured inks and metallic gel pens. In one of her most recent series featuring the citadel, bright yellow paper allows the blue ink to glow, evoking a divine presence reminiscent of stained glass windows in a cathedral.
Architectural motifs frequently recur in Garrigue’s drawings aligning her with other architectural visionaries such as Marcel Storr, Ferdinand Cheval and Sam Rodia who constructed the monumental Watts Towers. Grand structures such as citadels, temples and castles feature prominently, offering the viewer entrances or thresholds to worlds elsewhere. For Garrigue, these dwellings can serve as metaphysical and metaphorical refuges for the artist, protecting the spiritual entities that inhabit her unconscious. the feeling echoes Roger Cardinal’s phrase ‘Castles are Elsewhere’, suggesting that important discoveries lie beyond normal constraints, and André Breton’s Surrealist sentiment that ‘Existence is elsewhere,’ accessed through dream states and pure psychic automatism. For Garrigue, elsewhere represents immaterial worlds and her art an exploration of the threshold between the earthly and the spiritual.
Garrigue’s focus on the invisible is reflected in her dream series where faces, birds, plants, and ghostly shadows come together in what she describes as “marvellous state” like “a whirling rhythm close to vertigo.” It is this free-flowing, vibrational quality that gives her drawings an otherworldly feel, emphasising their immateriality. Furthering the idea of making visible the ordinarily invisible are Garrigue’s recurring series of flowers which also introduce vibrant colours into an otherwise monochromatic practice. These supramundane flora, which symbolise wondrous landscapes of higher planes, are reminiscent of works by mediumistic artists she admires, such as Cecilie Marková and Madge Gill. Ethereal and cosmic, these flowers pulse with life, their cilia and tendrils hinting at a primordial past, as well as an elegant garden of astral delights.
Ultimately, Garrigue’s work serves as an intimate journal of her inner life, a series of explorations into the mysteries of the soul. “My sole aim was to seek an answer to my eternal question: Who am I?” she says. After a decade of persistence, she has come to a profound realisation: “Are we not dual? One conscious of reality and another accessible only to initiates who can access the mysteries of our deepest and most spiritual self.” Through her drawings, Garrigue continues to explore these mysteries, offering viewers an insightful glimpse into the unseen realms that lie beyond the physical world.
Read my full article on Catherine in Raw Vision Magazine #122 published Spring 2025 called The Art of Catherine Garrigue: A Flâneuse in the Metropolis of her Mind.
Catherine Garrigue’s drawings are held in public and private collections throughout Europe and the United States. She is represented in the UK by the Jennifer Lauren Gallery
Selected Exhibitions
2025 Outsider Art Fair in New York with the Jennifer Lauren Gallery
2024 Outsider Art Fair in New York with the Jennifer Lauren Gallery
2022 Creative Spirits at The College of Psychic Studies, London where she was winner of their annual art competition
2018 Biennial of Singular Arts with Jean Louis Faravel
2015 Outsider Art Fair in Paris with Atelier Arts 23