“In order to survive in a civilization full of conventions, our instincts must be “educated”, our creativity must be “domesticated”. One must adapt to life in society, our mind must be orderly, and follow certain social norms and conventions,” says experienced painter David Berkowitz Chicago. “The artist, then, is a person who must somehow “recover” that original creativity, that unconventional way of thinking. You must regain your instinct”.
That is why, in modernity, what is called “primitivism” is highly valued: art uncontaminated by civilization, that of ancestral and / or exotic cultures. Berkowitz Chicago specifies in his articles on Muckrack that primitive art is a more original, more instinctive, less artificial or sophisticated art.
In this category of primitive art, which has much to do with the instinctual, the art of two classes of human beings can be found, whose minds operate in an “uncivilized” way: the art of children and that of the marginalized of society, such as the mentaly disturbed, alienated, misfits.
In 1945, the artist Jean Dubuffet, created the term ‘art brut’, to refer to the art of those who have no art training, but who also work outside the conventions (children, the deranged, criminals).
Berkowitz Chicago, who is a naive art painter specifies that art brut is closely related to naive art, which also is associated with that of children. The difference is that a naive artist, although he does not have an artistic training and in art he is “instinctive”, in everything else he is a person who lives and thinks according to social conventions.
David Berkowitz Chicago produces an art that is influenced by art brut. He tries to free himself from all prejudice, all aesthetic rules, all that has been learned and all contamination.
Finally, the talented painter indicates that this art is also called marginal art or outsider art.
David Berkowitz Chicago 