ART : Obsessions Mark Many Folk Works : Special exhibit at Laguna Art Museum vividly reflects the psychology of what are known as “outsiders.”

I used to think folk art was just the cute stuff--a cunning little bear made from a corn cob, a painting of stick-figure children pouring out of a one-room school. Even if such handiwork wasn’t made specifically for tourists or decorators on a whimsy hunt, it still seemed too nostalgic and saccharine to be taken seriously.

But some folk art--especially religious-inspired “visionary” art and the highly idiosyncratic work of institutionalized people, known as “outsider” art--reflects the psychology of its makers in remarkably vivid ways.

One of the major strengths of “The Cutting Edge: Contemporary American Folk Art,” at the Laguna Art Museum, is that it takes into account the difficult as well as the delightful side of works made by people with no formal training and little awareness of art-world standards.

Some of the 72 artists in the exhibit have been diagnosed as mentally ill, and quite a few have done time in jail. A number of these artists have had overwhelming religious experiences or traumatic experiences that led them to begin making art late in life.

Although there are sunny and seemingly benign pieces in the show (organized by the Museum of American Folk Art in New York from the huge private collection of Chuck and Jan Rosenak), many works reflect obsessive thoughts and behaviors. Everyday fears and fantasies are magnified and exposed by awkward renderings and odd conglomerations of such everyday odds and ends as mud, thumbtacks, window shades and old clothing.

Folk art has always been with us; in fact, the history of American painting is rooted in the work of itinerant sign painters. But only since the 1930s--after a landmark exhibit, “American Primitives,” at the Newark Museum in New Jersey--has folk art specifically been of interest to the art world.

In subsequent years, many important artists, from Jean Dubuffet to Mike Kelley, have embraced unconventional materials and incorporated raw, antisocial expression into their work. Current emphases on “marginal,” non-mainstream art and the relative lack of art-world interest in “finished” technique also have helped to put the untutored wildness of folk art in the spotlight.

Repetition is the humming motor of folk art. Design elements, words or objects appear over and over--spewed forth and clustered together by the sheer force of human compulsion. Bursting with foot-jiggling nervousness or girdled with muffled anxiety, the best pieces seem to have been prompted by enormous passions.

As if mesmerized by the soothing discipline of copying patterns, many of the artists laboriously attempt to reproduce fabric designs, bricks and floor boards. Rigid rows of parallel lines often serve as backgrounds or enclosures.

In most contemporary art exhibits, information about the artists’ lives is far less important than experiencing the work and understanding the art-world issues it engages. But folk artists make their own rules and, sometimes, their own mental worlds.

Getting to know a piece of folk art is a lot like reading a personal letter that you picked up in the street. In this exhibit, the brief biographies posted next to each piece serve as rudimentary pipelines to some curious states of mind and shattering life experiences.

Most of these artists are poor and live in rural areas. A significant proportion is black (ironically, many more than in typical museum shows of mainstream modern and contemporary artists). Some of the artists are virtually unknown outside their communities, although a few are widely collected, such as the Rev. Howard Finster, who has been the subject of one-man museum shows and a guest on TV talk shows.

(In a typical Finster painting, “World’s Largest Termite,” a giant termite tramples the stiff bodies of small, helpless people, alongside a hand-lettered screed about the insect that “thrives on mansion and beautiful forstes and the glory and honor of the nations.”)

Does worldly attention “corrupt” folk artists? Sometimes. Once any artist’s goal becomes pleasing an audience by turning out copies of much-praised work, something personal and genuine gets lost. (This exhibit, which has a more global focus, doesn’t allow viewers to track individual artists’ work over time and see what happens to a style when curators and collectors fall in love with it.)

In any case, the closer folk art gets to being simply an untutored expression of conventional, widely held ideas--prettified images of cliched attitudes--the duller it gets. Some works in the show, such as Mamie Deschillie’s cardboard “Cow,” are basically of the “cute ‘n’ harmless” variety, the sort of thing Americana shops perch next to the heart-shaped mirrors and eyelet-trimmed vanity seats.

Conversely, some of the most arresting works are raw expressions of private obsession--sexual, religious or just plain wacko.

Mose Tolliver, a sharecropper’s son who worked as a laborer until an accident made him unemployable, calls “Lady on Bicycle” one of his “nasty” paintings. Thinly painted on a small, roughly triangular piece of board, the subject is a big-headed splay-legged woman whose sexual organs are crudely reduced to a trio of oval shapes.

Inez Nathaniel Walker, who spent a chunk of her life in prison for killing a man who had mistreated her, used colored pencils to draw many images of women--probably fellow inmates--whom she called “bad girls.” The women in “Two Girls,” locked in a mutual stare, might be lovers. A tiny triangle of tongue sticks out of one woman’s mouth. Walker rendered the figures with huge heads, minutely textured hair, daintily detailed dress patterns and large eyes with individually curled lashes. The women’s absurdly tiny hands might be the artist’s way of conveying powerlessness.

Jesse Howard’s “Cross: The Saw and the Scroll” consists entirely of words written on a swath of canvas, bisected by a two-man saw. Howard, who lived in Missouri, spent decades decorating his 20-acre holdings with handmade signs reproducing Bible texts and stream-of-consciousness screeds denouncing politicians, taxes and his annoyed neighbors. In the piece on view, which is mostly about the Tower of Babel, Howard announces to one “Mr. Clay Morrison” that he is “so glad to think that some one is taking an interust (sic) in my work.”

Peter Charlie Bochero (who wrote his last name as Besharo) was a Syrian emigre, a sign painter whose mysterious works are cultural mishmashes of Middle Eastern imagery, “Buck Rogers” comic book figures and Christian religious symbolism with highly charged phrases and statistics referring to cosmic forces.

The eye-catching design of the painting “Police Plant Jubiter” (sic) includes a tent-like architectural object, a uniformed figure and a curling swastika-like shape floating on a solid background. Snippets of overheated, quasi-scientific text, replete with misspellings, assert--among other things--that members of Jupiter’s police force are 10 feet tall.

Other works are beguiling primarily because of their witty and unexpected use of materials, or the way they turn a familiar object into a personal vision.

Leslie J. Payne crafted his “New York Lady” after seeing the Statue of Liberty on a trip to New York City. The feisty little figure--amusingly reminiscent of some real New York women--stands with one arm akimbo, the other holding up a bicycle reflector light. Dangling single earrings decorate the sleeves of her painted tin blouse, and her squat legs are rooted in a small oil can.

Navajo artist Johnson Antonio carved “Smoking Break” from a piece of cottonwood in a tightly economical, compact way that mirrors the self-contained, hunched posture of the smoking American Indian figure whose alert, cocoa-colored dog seems to press itself into his legs.

Plenty more treats and surprises are included in this show. There is no catalogue, but die-hard devotees may be interested in the hefty and thorough Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists (Abbeville Press), available in the museum shop.