Spirit Guides the Hand
Art has been part of human culture since homo sapiens first scratched images on a cave wall. Long before the development of written language, pictures were the vehicle for perpetuating the stories of the tribe. Many of those stories were explanations for the divine order that set the world on its course.
Scripture says that in the beginning, “God created. . . .” Perhaps man and woman, created by God in God’s image, must also create.
Humanities scholar Richard Shusterman sums up the creative urge: “Art emerged in ancient times from myth, magic, and religion, and it has long sustained its compelling power through its sacred aura.”
A sacred aura surrounds much of the art of the American South, art that seems to rise organically from the rich black dirt of the Mississippi Delta, the thick red clay of Georgia, and the sandy soil of the sea isles. Its self-taught practitioners often believe they are ordained by a higher power to create.
Richard Law, forty-nine, a Savannah barber and son of a minister, began producing art in his childhood and never quit. For a while, he did fashion design, but now his paintings include depictions of religious practices that grew out of slavery and nourished his ancestors. “I think a connection with God is rooted in your upbringing,” he said. “Once that seed is planted, there’s a harvest coming. I definitely believe it is something that I’m born to do that justifies my existence.”
“THE LORD SPOKE TO ME THROUGH THE LIGHT AND SAID, ‘PAINT.’”
For Florida artist “Missionary” Mary Proctor, sixty-one, the message came in her midthirties, after the death in a house fire of the grandmother who raised her. “I asked the Lord, ‘Why did you leave me in this world? What was my purpose here?’” she said. “The Lord spoke to me through light and said, ‘Paint.’” Paint she did, and today she has pieces in the collections of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and in Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. Her paintings, many of women, done on cutouts of tin, bear written messages such as “amazing grace” and “I refuse to let hate grow in my garden.” Some are hymn lyrics or Bible verses; some are sayings of her grandmother.
Danette Sperry, sixty, of Maysville, is Southern by choice. She grew up in Connecticut but fell in love with Georgia one spring as a young adult. Her bright, three-dimensional textured paintings of flowers and birds are not overtly religious but, she believes, have a spiritual aspect. When both her brother and her father were undergoing cancer treatment some twelve years ago, Sperry started painting angels as a way to “get through the pain.” As both men eventually succumbed to the illness, Sperry said she found comfort in the angels she painted. Now, she said, “if I don’t have an angel, I feel compelled to make one. I always have to have one around to watch over me.”
The art form of Law, Proctor, Sperry, and other untrained artists has many titles: folk, naive, and self-taught. Dr. Katherine Jentleson has two of the terms in her title. She is the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum. Jentleson said she first encountered self-taught art from the South while living in New York City. “I kept running into works by artists I was attracted to,” she said. She mentioned William Edmondson and Thornton Dial.
Edmondson was a Tennessee-born sculptor, the son of freed slaves, who died in 1951. Like Proctor, Edmondson, a Primitive Baptist, believed God told him to take up art. He started with tombstones, then began carving decorative sculptures in stones salvaged from demolished buildings. Some were biblical characters and angels, others were animals, and still others were community leaders important to African Americans. Through a chain of acquaintances, his work came to the attention of the Museum of Modern Art, and, in 1937, he became the first African American artist to have a one-person exhibition there.
Lorenzo Scott (American, born 1934), Reunion in Heaven (of the “House of the Prayer Children”), 2001-2002, oil on canvas, wood, automative bonding compound, and gold paint, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of John J. Farmer, 2005.335.
Lorenzo Scott (American, born 1934), Untitled (Jesus’ Baptism), 1991, oil on canvas, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Randy Siegel, 1998.98. © Lorenzo Scott.
Dial, the illiterate son of a teenage mother, was raised in poverty in rural Alabama. While working at a series of jobs in Bessemer, an industrial suburb of Birmingham, he made creations from cast-off materials that, according to the New York Times, told the story of the Black struggle in the South. His three-dimensional paintings “are like patches of rough seas in which the faces and figures of living things rise and sink among waves of detritus and color,” a Times critic wrote in 1993. Dial died in 2016. He saw a spiritual purpose to his work. “Art is like a bright star up ahead in the darkness of the world,” he once said. “It can lead peoples through the darkness and help them from being afraid of the darkness.”
The works of Edmondson, Dial, and other self-taught artists still inspire curator Jentleson, who came to the High Museum in 2015. She herself is not particularly religious or even spiritual, she said. She was raised Jewish in an interfaith home but practices no particular religion now. She admires the artists because “they all have these amazing stories of resilience,” she said. “It’s the power of the human spirit. Even if their talent is not nurtured, they can still persist.”
Among the Southern self-taught artists whose work includes religious or spiritual-based pieces, there are several approaches. Some want to bring people to the Christian faith—or bring the Christian faith to people. Some make “memory paintings” that show scenes of a simpler rural lifestyle, including river baptisms, dinners on the grounds, weddings, and funerals. Some show scenes from the Bible. Some work in the fantastic or abstract, often based on what they believe are divine visions. Some do more than one kind. And some blur the lines between the types.
Bringing a Message from God || Mary Proctor adopted the title “Missionary,” she said, because “he voice of the Lord said you’re on a mission.”
“What mission?”
“Keeping hope alive in the world. Live right. Be neighborly. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
“IT MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE YOU’RE CREATING WITH YOUR HEART AND SOUL.”
She believes she was chosen by God before she was born because she came out of the womb with a caul—or embryonic membrane—on her head. The rare condition is believed in some cultures to be the mark of a special gift. Her grandmother told her that she was named Mary because she was designated by the Almighty for something extraordinary.
Proctor was raised in the church but no longer goes. She believes the people in the pews are too hateful and judgmental. The God she worships is loving and forgiving—like her grandmother. As a child, climbing on a chair to snatch some tea cakes, she slipped and knocked off a stack of her grandmother’s prized Blue Willow plates, which fell to the floor and broke. “She didn’t whip me,” Proctor said. “She forgave me. She said God forgives. You have to forgive. It was the most wonderful message.”
Herbert Singleton (American, 1945-2007), Hallelujah Door, 1993, wooden door with enamel paint, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, T. Marshall Hahn Collection, 1996.185. © Herbert Singleton/Barrister’s Gallery.
Proctor became pregnant while in the tenth grade and made it no further in school. The baby’s father left her, just as her own father had left her teenage mother. She later married Tyrone Proctor, now a retired firefighter. They’ve been a couple for forty years.
One of her three sons died in a car crash while he was being pursued by police. She said she tries not to be bitter. “You have to cast hate out every day.” Painting helps her to do that. “I love to paint,” she said. “Painting relieves me. It relieves my stress.”
Perhaps the best known and certainly one of the most prolific self-taught Southern artists of the twentieth century was the Rev. Howard Finster of Summerville, in the northwest corner of Georgia. Finster dropped out of school after the sixth grade and, by age sixteen, was preaching but, as an adult, also did carpentry and plumbing, repaired bicycles, and made clocks to support a wife and five children. He became frustrated that he didn’t think his congregants remembered his sermons past Sunday lunch.
In the 1960s, he began to put his messages in more concrete terms, literally. The result was Paradise Garden, a fantastic environment constructed on land behind his house using anything he could pick up. He incorporated admonitions and Scripture verses into the landscape. Over a big ox yoke on the side of a shed, he wrote, “Take my yoke upon you.” Over a walk paved with old keys was the message “Prayer is the key.” Buttons, marbles, plastic toys, baby food jars—“anything that will last, I mold it in,” he told a reporter in 1976.
That was about the time he began to paint. The story he told was that when he was refurbishing a bicycle, the image of a face appeared in the white paint on his thumb. “While I was lookin’ at it, a warm flash kinda went all over me, all the way down, and it said, ‘Paint sacred art,’” he said. His paintings, like his garden, were exuberant and covered with messages. He numbered each one, and when he died in 2001, at age eighty-four, they numbered in the thousands. His personality, as vibrant as his work, earned him a spot on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show and an appearance in an R.E.M. music video. Paradise Garden fell into disrepair after his death, but it is being restored and is once again open to the public.
For Finster, “religious zeal and desire to convert as many souls as possible” was at the root of his art, said Jentleson.
Remembering How Things Were—Or Weren’t || The late Clementine Hunter was the illiterate daughter of slaves who worked in the cotton fields and kitchens of Louisiana plantations. She was in her sixties, working at Melrose Plantation, when she borrowed some paint and a brush from a visiting artist and created her first piece of art on a torn window shade. Her idyllic scenes included baptisms, funerals, and people walking to church. In 1955, because she was Black, she had to slip into a gallery at Northwestern State University in her hometown of Natchitoches, where her work was being displayed. Thirty years later, the university gave her an honorary doctorate.
When Hunter died in 1988, she was believed to be 101 years old.
Thornton Dial, Jr. (American, born 1953), Jesus Christ of All the Races, ca. 1988, wood, metal, paint, and industrial sealing compound, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, T. Marshall Hahn Collection, 1996.172. © Thornton Dial, Jr.
The late Mattie Lou O’Kelley, a Georgia artist who began painting scenes of rural life at age sixty, is another example of the nostalgic, or memory, school of folk art. Her work reflected her rural childhood with scenes of farm life and, occasionally, a church. O’Kelley left school in ninth grade, when her father died, and worked as a seamstress, cook, and waitress.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum, which has her work in its collection, says she “created colorful scenes in which the sun is always shining, the people are happy, and the crops are plentiful.”
The artists may be “longing to imagine themselves in kind of a rural golden age,” said Jentleson.
“I think a lot of times it’s artists’ attempts to rewrite their personal history, focusing on the good parts,” said Margaret Day Allen, author of When the Spirit Speaks: Self-Taught Art of the South, a volume of profiles of thirty-two Southern painters, sculptors, and other artists. “If an artist paints a picture of going to church or dinner on the grounds, it looks like fun. There’s something powerful with the art that speaks to people whether they’ve had the same life experience or not.”
Bessie Harvey (American, 1929-1994), Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, ca. 1990, wood, paint, and plastic beads, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Lynne and Jim Browne, 2005.208. © Bessie Harvey. Photo by Michael McKelvey.
Savannah artist Richard Law’s religious paintings could be described as nostalgia for a life he never knew. Growing up in the coastal area where Georgia meets South Carolina, he was grounded in the Gullah-Geechee culture of his grandparents. West African people who were brought to be slaves working the rice and indigo plantations on isolated islands mingled memories of their native heritage with plantation customs. The result was unique language, crafts, food, and music. Religion was an important part of the lives of many slaves, and plantations often had a small chapel or “praise house” for their worship.
Law’s grandparents “all went to a community Baptist church,” he said. “They were very strict with that.” The preacher was an important, revered, and obeyed figure in the community. In some of Law’s paintings of religious services, the minister is the central figure. But Law also occasionally injects a bit of humor. In a painting called The Deacon Board, he portrayed a woman sitting among the men. “I remember a time when the deacons led the church, but the women ran the church,” he said. “That was true in the home as well.”
Genesis to Revelation in Paint || Bible stories have long been a favorite subject for artists.
Think the Sistine Chapel ceiling—from The Creation of Adam to The Last Judgment. Some self-taught Southern artists produce their own interpretations of the scriptures.
“Most of the artists are grounded in the Christian evangelical tradition,” said Dr. Carol Crown, retired professor at Memphis University and editor of two books about self-taught Southern artists, Coming Home: Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South and Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art. “Some of it is that they know the stories. They’re expressing what they’ve been brought up on.”
Clementine Hunter, “Tent Revival,” 1950s.
Clementine Hunter, “Frenchie Goin’ to Heaven,” mid 1970s.
Art is often a way for the artists “to express the joy they have in the religious teachings they’ve experienced,” she said. But for Black artists, the work can take on another role.
“Many African American artists who are working in biblical imagery are using that way to speak about Black suffering,” said Jentleson. “The book of Exodus is something you see again and again—parallels between the struggle of freedom of the Jewish people and their own struggle for freedom.” The Crucifixion is also a common theme, she said.
Clementine Hunter, “Crucifixion with Red Zinnias,” 1965. Photographs by David Horan. Courtesy of the Art Museum of the University of Memphis.
Self-taught artist Lorenzo Scott, a native of West Point, Georgia, drew on Renaissance and baroque painters to create his own versions of their work imbued with his experience as a Black man in the South.
Scott began drawing as a young boy after watching his mother make a sketch. When his mother lost her job in a cotton mill during the Depression, she moved the family to Atlanta, where Scott was captivated by a painting on display in a store window. Although he stopped formal schooling at the tenth grade, he set about educating himself about art, studying books and visiting the High Museum, where people began to recognize him.
Church was a major part of his childhood, as were visions—including one of blood dropping on him and disappearing. Blood became a recurring theme in his art. He also claimed to have heard God speak to him several times and to have had encounters with both angels and devils.
“THERE’S A LOT OF GRACE TO A LOT OF THESE ARTISTS, AND THEIR ART WILL GIVE YOU A SENSE OF GRACE.”
Black and brown angels watch over the Baptism of a brown Jesus by a Black John the Baptist in one painting. Angels also show up in the context of social commentary. In one painting, a Black man is being executed in the electric chair. As the man’s spirit leaves his body, he is being guided by a Black angel while Jesus holds his arm. More angels await him in the clouds holding banners. One quotes John 16:3 from the King James Version: “And these things will they do unto you because they have not known the Father, nor me.”
Dreams and Visions || Many of the South’s self-taught artists claim to have had dreams and/or visions. Some, such as North Carolina artist Minnie Evans, paint them. Evans once told a reporter, “I have no imagination. I never plan a drawing; they just happen. In a dream, it was shown to me what I have to do, of paintings.”
Danette Sperry, “In the Spirit of Nature.” Courtesy of the artist. © Danette Sperry.
Evans, who was born in 1892 and died in 1987, traced her ancestry back to a person brought to the United States from Trinidad as a slave.
The influence of that Caribbean background comes through in her art, according to critics. Her first artworks were done in crayon and “resemble an exercise employing every color in a gigantic box of Crayolas,” a Smithsonian description says. Many of her works are of human faces surrounded by plant and animal shapes. “They take the form of semisymmetrical mandalas,” said Jentleson.
“Evans’s paintings are essentially religious in inspiration and represent a world in which God, man, and nature are synonymous,” according to the Smithsonian. “They are the works of a visionary who equated God with nature, color with His divine presence, and dreams and visions with reality.”
Art Appreciation || Many self-taught artists begin working because they feel they must, said author Margaret Day Allen. Of the thirty-two artists she interviewed for her book, “I would say all of them have sort of a common internal desire to create that they can’t explain. For a lot of people, that is a touch of the divine whether they describe it as coming from God or something inborn within them.”
Maysville artist Danette Sperry finds producing her art “healing,” whether angels or flowers or birds. “It makes you feel in touch with yourself and in tune with other things,” she said. “It makes you feel like you’re creating with your heart and soul. When other people find joy in it or love it, that’s very rewarding because you’ve passed that joy on to someone else.”
Like the artists, some people who appreciate the art are religious; others aren’t.
Howard Finster (American, 1916-2001), The Angel of the Lord, #10,000, paint on plywood, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, T. Marshall Hahn Collection, 1997.75. © Howard Finster/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dan Boone appreciates the art and wants to make sure other people have the opportunity to get to know it. A retired Atlanta money manager, he now lives in the South Carolina Low Country. As a Baptist-cum-Episcopalian, he worshipped for many years at St. Anne’s. Boone endowed Jentleson’s curator position at the High Museum. He said he believed that Atlanta, at the crossroads of African American and Southern Appalachian artists, should have the world’s best collection of their works. “I think we’re there,” he said.
While providing a vehicle for the public to view the art he loves, Boone has kept plenty for himself. “I love living with this art,” he said. “It’s all around the walls of my bedroom. I love waking up to it.”
Collector Carl Mullis, a retired Atlanta attorney, acquired a large collection of self-taught Southern art, much of which he has donated to the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens. He was raised Southern Baptist but no longer attends a church. Nevertheless, he appreciates the religious and spiritual aspects of the art as well as what he describes as its “raw energy.”
“I live with the stuff,” he said. “I contemplate the art. Even the same artist will have different pieces that evoke different emotions. There’s a lot of grace to a lot of these artists, and their art will give you a sense of grace.”
The master artist Leonardo da Vinci understood the relationship between the mystical force and human creativity. “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art,” he said. Likewise, within the self-taught Southerners who feel they were created to create, the spirit guides the hand.
Richard Law, “We will serve the Lord.” Courtesy of the artist.
