When listening to the discourse surrounding the work of outsider artists, I often feel it is a parody of the already ludicrous talk in the traditional gallery circuit. Indeed, it’s likely that most artists, even rich and famous ones, might be considered ‘outsider’. After all, most artist live unconventional lives, and most are driven to create, regardless of what our impression is of their creation. From Van Gogh to Basquiat, it’s safe to conclude that many artists are peculiar, to say the least, and that’s what makes the work fascinating. When I hear pretentious nattering about ‘masterful use of colour’ or ‘graffiti inspired surrealism’ from swollen urbanites, I think the point of art is sorely missed by nearly everyone who studies it. Whether we are looking at abstract paint drippings, flawless realism, or detailed pointillism, isn’t the real heart of art the story it tells of the artist, and of the artist’s world?
“Outsider Art” is a catchall phrase for various ‘isms’ in the art world. The term implies and assumes that the artist lives in some way outside the norm, that he or she exists in the margins, and that he or she be extra-eccentric, visionary, insane, or imprisoned. Outsider artists are also self-taught, without formal training in art. I truly suspect that most artists flirt with at least one or two of those categories, though most of the ‘masters’ had some training to help them tell their fascinating inner stories. Because classic outsider artists don’t, I feel that ‘criticism’ is kind of moot, and what is most vital is not ‘progression of form’ or ‘experimenting with perspective’ but what the images suggest about a person and the way he or she saw the world. Is art not one of the oldest forms of storytelling, after all?
It is this misstep, in my mind, that disallows much of the public from the enjoyment of art. It’s classic to hear, “My nephew could draw that- it’s hanging on my fridge!” Too many are locked out of their own experience of art because they supposedly lack the tools to interpret imagery. Meanwhile, the hoity-toity wine swillers are robbing the everyman of his totally valid experiences inside and outside of the gallery. Remember George Costanza’s horror at being asked to meet Jerry’s artist girlfriend? He felt like a buffoon inside of his own impression of art, and in trying to come off as knowledgeable and hip, he ends up buying a hideous abstract he can’t afford.
Now, in the early 1940s, Bill Traylor wondered what in the world his cardboard drawings were doing up on a gallery wall. Voices around him discussed his “world of sharply defined silhouetted figures and beasts (1),” and his “ongoing visual narrative (2).” They talked about “the elemental simplicity” and “the composition of beautiful play of straight and curves lines in its suggestion of some ritual dance or just a playful moment. (3)”
In reality, Traylor’s unschooled, childlike pencil and poster paint drawings were memorable because their story is remarkable, not because Traylor preferred primary colours and never mixed paints. These type of actions were not planned effects- this is a man who was born as a slave in Alabama, who began drawing at the age of 85, and made 1500 drawings in a three year period, sitting on a stoop in Montgomery, Alabama. The value is what the pictures reflect of an illiterate man’s life, of his memories growing up in a plantation cabin with no education, and becoming homeless in old age. This is a man who slept on a pile of rags among empty coffins in a funeral home, who manically created images that documented his mixed memories of his African heritage, his farming experiences, his love of dogs and cats, and his observations of the south.
Bill was probably born in 1856, and he wore the name Traylor like his “master,” George Traylor. He lived in a slave cabin in Benton, Alabama, and as an infant, his mother most likely tied him to a tree while she worked the fields, until he was old enough to help out, as was the tradition. The Civil War began when Bill was about five years old; heightening the abject poverty his slave family already lived in. Pork was plentiful, however, as were cabbage and collard greens, but Bill spent most of his life with no possessions at all. Writer Mary Lyons said that the people of small southern towns like Benton, Alabama, where Bill was, lived on “pure gumption.”
Traylor remained on the plantation for most of his life as a laborer after the war freed him to be paid. Little is known of the details of his adolescence and adulthood, but by his thirties, he had a wife and four children. Once, Bill said he had raised 20 children. He may have taken responsibility for kids orphaned by the war or hardship, or he may have had several sets of children if he married more than once. Though technically he was free, the KKK burned schoolhouses and Bill was illiterate. It was safest to stay on the plantation and farm for food. The former slaves made the workday more tolerable by singing rhythmic religious filed songs known as shouts or hollers. These songs later gave way to the blues.
Though cotton farming paid better wages, Bill tried to grow as much food as he could. He remarked once that, “You could have that building over there full of money, but you couldn’t eat it.” Most of Traylor’s long days were spent working the mules, growing food, plowing. Storytelling sustained the nights- legends of Railroad Bill, the ‘black Robin Hood” and voodoo legends gave depth and entertainment to family time. Of course, families like Bill’s looked forward to weekends: moonshine parties were common in Alabama, and everyone drank corn liquor and square danced to fiddlers. Fights were commonplace. “What little sense I did have,” Bill allegedly said, “Whiskey took away.” Of course, the sins of Saturday were taken in to the church on Sunday, and southern black Christianity was another way that Bill and families like his endured hardship.
Bill was almost 80 when “my white folks had died and my children scattered.” He worked briefly in a shoe factory in Montgomery, but his rheumatism was severe, forcing him to ‘retire’ on welfare wages of fifteen bucks a month. It was 1939, and on a stoop not far from the funeral home where he crashed among coffins, he drew his famous 1500 drawings in three years. He sketched on cardboard and found papers, with coloured pencils and sometimes poster paint. He drew mules and people and whiskey drinkers and cats and dogs and preachers and farms and teakettles. Observers saw how content the old man was, calmly smoking a pipe, drawing until late evening every day. He tied string to his drawings and hung them on a fence so people could see them, and when people bought them, usually for less than ten cents, Bill was amused. “Sometimes they buys ‘em when they don’t even need ‘em,” he apparently stated.
It’s a man named Charles Shannon that we must thank for the stories we know about Bill’s life as a freed slave. He was a trained artist who met Traylor on that Monroe Street stoop, and he was enchanted with the life Traylor was depicting. When Bill moved to the floor of a shoe repair store, he was able to work under an overhang, so he could work even if it was raining, and he stored his art behind a chest. Charles brought him art supplies and paints, most of which Bill never used.
Charles looked out for the unusual artist, but he was drafted in 1942. After the war, he found Traylor at his spot behind the pool hall, though Traylor had moved all over to live with various children. The old man was in poor health- he’d had gangrene, and his leg had been removed. The former slave had not felt inspired to draw during the war years, and he didn’t now. About a year later, Charles went to a hospital to visit Bill, and he was so aged and ill he couldn’t even speak.
Charles Shannon said he saw in Traylor “a kind of beautiful simplicity,” and he saved all of the man’s drawings when he passed on, probably around 1948. Shannon had helped organize three exhibitions of Traylor’s work while the artist was living, and he had been shy about it. For 30 years, Shannon held onto this treasure trove, but when he unearthed them decades later, during the 1970s, interest in his biography was strong. Whether Bill Traylor would have liked it or not, he became a famous artist.
1 and 2.Raw Creation, Outsider Art and Beyond, by John Maizels. Phaidon Press, 1996.
3. Self-Taught Artists of the Twentieth Century, by various curators at the Museum of American Folk Art. Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1998.
Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.
Available at:
www.thegirlcanwrite.net/buybook.html
Please support my blog by shopping for books through this link:
chapters.indigo.ca
