Keeping an eye on trending exhibition themes in the area, I’m sensing a folk art frenzy taking hold of Tampa. From the folk art show at Clayton Galleries to the Tampa Museum of Art’s exhibition coming up in early October, and now the MFA’s From the Heart: Folk Art on Paper, you’ll be sure to get your fill this year.
Folk art has a tendency to be part of a tradition or community and is deeply rooted in the craft field, yet isn’t functional. Since these Southern self-taught artists use whatever materials are available to them, paper is a great material to focus on because it is so easily accessible. It’s inspirational to see the medium’s potential as a finished product rather than just as a sketch for a painting on canvas or panel.
Many of the folk artists in the show, like Woodrow Wilson Long, were born into families of farmers or migrant workers. After spending most of his life traveling around the world performing tough manual labor, Long retired and began recreating his memories in paint. “Girl on a Tricycle” is a piece I kept coming back to not only for its bold, vibrant colors, but also for the play of geometric rhythm between the figures in the foreground and the diagonal lines in the background. The hot pink line across the middle of the piece grabs your eye and highlights the blonde pig-tailed girl on her tricycle, who seems to glide across the page with her friend (or doll) riding in the front basket. Recording the everyday, or even just a moment or thought, is what folk art is about: to preserve life in a flash of expressive clarity rather than belaboring over realistic details.
Other artists in the show found their creative sides while in jail. Inez Nathaniel Walker first took up drawing while in prison for killing a man who’d abused her, using the prison newsletters as her drawing surface. The double portraits of her fellow inmates in “Untitled” stare at you discomfitingly from across the room with widely opened eyes and stylized eyelashes. Using colored pencils, Walker focuses on repetition of lines that form distinct patterns, especially in the textured hair. Because of folk art’s distance from academic and commercial art, you can sense a connection on a basic human level. Simple and direct, it’s able to address tough issues — like imprisonment, poverty and racism — head-on.
There’s no need to run to the art store to grab some artist-grade pencils when you have soot and spit: Presto, painting! (Well, there’s no James Castle here, but he’s a great example of unique material usage.) Using non-hierarchical art materials, artists like Nellie Mae Rowe needed other options besides expensive oil paints to make their mark. In her piece “Rolling Tree Mule,” crayons never looked so good; her bold blocks of color and elaborate patterning are reminiscent of the quilts her mother made. Through originality, vitality and ambiance, Rowe transforms a material that’s thought of as nothing special into something exceptional.
Considering that art is supposed to be about freedom of expression, art instruction, with its rigid rules on technique, can be quite a shock. Most art instructors would tell you, for instance, that it’s a big no-no to muddy your colors together, or they'd cringe at the thought of not coloring inside the lines.
But Thorton Dial doesn’t care about your rules. In one of the largest pieces in the show, “Traveling for Business,” a woman’s body winds back and forth across the page, forms kept at a minimum. Dial’s sweeping charcoal outlines have been watered-down, poetically bleeding into the greens, blues, and browns of his pastels. Keeping your eyes busy chasing one line after another, Dial continually amazes with his compositional grace.
You may think to yourself, “Well, I could do that!” Sure, it might be true that you could make something in the style of folk art, but this expressive voice isn’t yours. Just as you can distinguish your friend speaking over the phone, each of these artists has a distinct, recognizable visual voice that resonates with their personal experiences or struggles. At the same time, perhaps that’s the whole point of folk art: to open the doors to art for and from the masses.
What’s more interesting than painting what you see is what is seen with your inner eye, the things that no one else can see. Without fitting conventions of how art “should” look like, each self-taught artist has a unique voice that comes straight from the heart.
From the Heart: Folk Art on Paper.
Through Nov. 13, MFA St. Pete, 255 Beach Drive N.E., St. Petersburg.
This article appears in Sep 15-22, 2016.