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LENNIE BENNETTWorks on display at a Tampa gallery are not concerned with technique or style; instead, they are unfettered expressions by the artists.
TAMPA - I am resisting the strong call to think analytically about "Contemporary Folk Expressions," an exhibition at Clayton Galleries; analyzing it is about the worst thing we can do to folk art.
That's not because the artists mostly work intuitively; so have many traditional artists to whom conventional criticism can be applied. Folk art, unlike surrealist art, for example, is not as answerable to artistic conventions or criticism because true folk artists haven't absorbed academic techniques or the narratives and images of art history.
Viewers with more sophisticated experiences often impose influences and associations on folk art, making its creators unwitting iconoclasts who break rules they've never learned, emulate artists they've never heard of.
Let's not go there.
Rather, let's take a leisurely stroll through the gallery and just enjoy the show.
And let's clarify the term. Folk art is a big, broad category, traditionally describing crafts and functional objects. To many, folk art means those quaintly carved door hangers, usually in red, white and blue, with heraldic aphorisms such as "Back Door Friends Are the Best Kind." (That isn't a jab, but you know what I mean.) And sometimes it's lumped with art brut, work associated with mentally or emotionally disturbed people, or outsider art.
The art in Clayton Galleries includes lots of examples we recognize instantly as being in the folk art tradition, and perhaps a few could be classified as outsider art, but it makes better sense to call these people self-taught artists who work outside of the mainstream.
The exhibit is curated by Jeanne Kronsnoble, who knows her stuff. Kronsnoble, wife of artist Jeff Kronsnoble, owns a Georgia gallery specializing in folk art, and she spends most of the year seeking out talented practitioners to stock it. For the exhibition at Clayton, she and gallery owner Cathy Clayton roamed the back roads of several states for two weeks collecting art. What they have brought back reflects the diversity of the genre.
Some of the artists, such as Purvis Young, are famous even beyond folk art circles. Many aren't, such as Ernest Hand, whose marvelous carved wood fish sculptures were discovered by accident in Wewahitchka by Kronsnoble and Clayton.
A hallmark of this type of art is its reliance on found materials, usually used for economic reasons. An artist who calls himself Mr. Imagination builds plaster faces on Ping-Pong paddles, then paints and tops them with elaborate headdresses fashioned from brushes and bottle caps. Taft Richardson collects animal bones and sculpts them into delicate assemblages that speak more of affirmation than death and decay. Jimmy Lee Sudduth uses mud with the same finesse as paint in Statue of Liberty, a jazzed-up version of Lady Liberty in a short skirt, hands on her hips, welcoming us with a bright smile. It exudes joy.
Joy links much of the work in this show like connective tissue. You read the wall plaques outlining the artists' lives and learn that many grew up in unimaginable poverty, deprivation and loss. They channeled their need for self-expression into their art.
It isn't all sweetness and light here, however. Jay Schuette's narrative paintings are odd and disturbing domestic scenes. Schuette is atypical of many artists tagged with the folk label; he has a creative writing degree and undoubtedly has more than a passing knowledge of cultural currents. But he has had no formal art training. The story goes that he picked up a brush one day and let the images emerge: angular people with distorted limbs and features, often staring at us from rooms covered in richly patterned materials. For all their comfortable surroundings, they look impoverished. The works are beautiful in their way, like a strange dream.
Mary Proctor is another well-known artist, often displaying her work at outdoor art shows such as Gasparilla. Like most of her peers, she recycles materials; she tends to choose items that are part of the story she's telling in her collages. For anyone of a certain age, they're evocative. Viewing My Grandmother's Old Buttons, in which an old woman and young girl are covered with them, or My Grandmother's Green Stamps, in which sheets of those sticky green squares compose the females' dresses, brought back childhood hours spent mining my mother's button box or helping her paste stamps into redemption books.
Unlike most trained artists, folk artists such as Proctor have no interest in aesthetic "growth" or evolving a style or technique. They find one and stick with it, making their individual work so recognizable. You know immediately a Buddy Snipes work, even if it isn't grouped with his others. Snipes uses sheets of scrap metal (old plywood and cardboard are other favorite surfaces of folk artists) for his portraits and frames them in sticks. The figures consist of simplistic forms: a circular head with two white dots for eyes, nose and mouth defined as unpainted areas, arms and splayed hands growing from a neckless torso. All of them have uniformity, yet he imbues each with a specific personality in a small detail - the way the body tilts or its relation to a hog standing in the foreground.
And the titles! Abraham Whispering Sweet Talk in Lucille's Ear; Old Man Jack Thornton and Rod Puckett Trying to Out Dance Each Other; A Boy Named Death in This Family Could Out Run Anybody in a Foot Race. The last is a poignant scene, more detailed than most of Snipes' work, with a large family standing above a number of other, mostly small figures, painted horizontally, which, given the title, probably represent dead children.
I return to that word, joy. It's there, even in a death scene, as it is in the drawings of Frank Scarborough, who signs his name Frankie. He's a developmentally challenged man who lost the use of an arm and sight in one eye years ago. But the eye and hand he can still use are in remarkable league with each other, creating a bright, full world on small pieces of paper. A white fence follows the jaunty curve of a pink road on which a bus chugs along. A house sits placidly on a hill and two boys call to each other, their faces vaguely resembling animals, sporting shocks of hair cut in Mohawks. It bursts with observation and is a beautifully composed work of art.
But I'm getting analytical. Joy persists.
-- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW "Tenth Anniversary Contemporary Folk Expressions" is at Clayton Galleries, 4105 S MacDill Ave., Tampa, through April 17. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. (813) 831-3753.