Black folk artist's works dazzle

"Paintin' is a lot harder than pickin' cotton. Cotton's right there for you to pull off the stalk, but to paint you got to sweat your mind."

-- Clementine Hunter, as quoted in Reader's Digest, December 1975

EL DORADO -- When revered self-taught folk artist Clementine Hunter began painting in the late 1930s at Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches, La., she sold her works for as little at 50 cents each.

Hunter, who died in 1988 at age 101, produced thousands of paintings. Today, works by the woman who became known as the "Black Grandma Moses" in the 1950s can bring tens of thousands of dollars for her most collectible pieces.

The 74 works of art that make up "Clementine Hunter: The Nolan Collections," the current exhibit at the South Arkansas Arts Center, were collected by the late Theodosia Murphy Nolan, who was a child when she met Hunter at Melrose.

The exhibition was curated by Tom Whitehead, co-author of two books on Hunter's life and art. The pieces from the Nolan family's collections were in two El Dorado homes and at the Nolan-owned Cherokee Plantation in the Cane River region of northwest Louisiana.

And what an exhibition this is.

Hunter, whose first name is pronounced Clem-un-teen, was the granddaughter of a slave and born on a plantation. She lived in northwest Louisiana, never going more than 100 miles from her home. Her work reflects her life's experiences of living and working on plantations. Nolan loved Hunter's paintings, which she felt documented a way of life before farms were mechanized.

Whitehead has smartly organized the show by theme: work, flowers (zinnias were Hunter's favorite), play, religion and assorted works. The gallery exhibit guide displays how Hunter's signature (she could not read or write) began and changed, a timeline that helped date the works.

Hunter's work hangs at the Smithsonian Institution, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, the High Museum of Atlanta, the Dallas Museum of Art and many other museums.

One of the most important of American folk artists, Hunter was initially described as a primitive painter. Her work is distinguished by simple, but not literal depictions and a vivid color sense that sometimes suggests quilting patterns. Her style was intuitive, bold and exuberant. Her compositions radiate a strong rhythm and vitality. They may be simple, but her art has a palpable strength and spiritual power.

Whitehead's book, Clementine Hunter: Her Life and Art, quotes Louisiana art dealer Shelby Gilley, who wrote the book Painting From the Heart about Hunter, as saying Hunter had "an unerring sense of color and composition, originality of treatment and her wit."

Because she most often painted from memory, as did Grandma Moses, Hunter also is known as a "memory painter." Her painted memories of funerals and honky-tonks are as colorful as her weddings and religious pieces.

Several of each are in the South Arkansas Art Center show. Wedding (circa 1950) is magnetic. The bridesmaid, in a vivid blue dress, holds the bride's bouquet aloft. The exhibition's poster piece, Picking Cotton (circa 1970), is one of the best of her plantation pieces here, along with Cotton Picking With Geese (1970s). The latter shows women in red and white hats, with geese between the rows of cotton plants. The geese were a sort of pest control, as they consumed insects.

Uncle Jack Goes to Church, depicting a controversial statue of a bent-over black man that once stood in downtown Natchitoches, has the statue standing outside a church. The painting could be easily seen as social commentary. The statue is now in the Rural Life Museum at Louisiana State University.

Also memorable is Baptisin' from the 1980s, with women in bright white dresses and mantillas. Hunter's depictions of the sky and water in this, as well as many other works, intrigues. Strokes of various colors in varied lengths make sky and water appear as charged as the scenes themselves.

Several of Hunter's works depict Mary and the baby Jesus, while Six Angels ... Four Good and Two Bad is just what its title suggests.

In the 1960s, she experimented with abstraction, an example of which hangs in this show.

Hunter painted on many surfaces. One of her best floral pieces was done on a shingle; there are also painted bottles and jugs in the show.

Maud's White Pitcher is especially fascinating; it's one of a few works on paper by Hunter. Likely painted in the mid to late 1940s, it also is one of a few for which Hunter thinned her oil paint to create the effect of a wash.

But does Hunter's work still speak to us today? Absolutely. Its reach is well beyond its depiction of early 20th-century black American farm life in the South.

Contemporary composer Robert Wilson, known for his opera Einstein on the Beach (written with Philip Glass), met Hunter as a child and collects her paintings. He wrote an opera based on Hunter titled Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter. It premiered in 2013.

As Whitehead puts it in his book: "For me Clementine's story is more than pictures on boards. It is the story of the most remarkable person I ever met. She was not educated, she never traveled, she never had an art lesson, but Clementine Hunter taught me much. I learned from her that intelligence, wit and talent arise sometimes from the least likely among us."

MORE CLOAR

Art lovers may have to make another trip to El Dorado before the end of the year. The South Arkansas Museum of Art's next exhibition will be a show of Carroll Cloar works, including some from private collections that have never been exhibited. The Cloar works will hang Nov. 3-Dec. 31.

Email:

ewidner@arkansasonline.com

Style on 10/05/2014