Bill Traylor

One of my favorite artists of all time is Bill Traylor.

Bill Traylor
1854-1949

Bill Traylor was born, grew up and lived pretty much all his life in Alabama, outside of and in Montgomery. He was born a slave, freed after the Civil War, and it appears his family stayed on as sharecroppers in Church Hill, outside of Montgomery, on the plantation owned by their former owner, George Traylor. In the 20’s and 30’s, his family disbanded, or slowly left the sharecropping life to seek their livelihoods elsewhere, as the post-war cotton industry perished and the Depression hit, and the original plantation owners died as well.

Bill wound up striking out on his own late in his life, at the age of 82. He moved to Montgomery and worked in a shoe factory for a time, but he was so old he couldn’t really keep up and had to quit, which left him homeless and destitute (though helped somewhat by the federal relief fund). A funeral parlor owner let him sleep in the back of his building and during the day he sat by the road outside a blacksmith’s shop or on the street in the center of Montgomery and drew. Passersby could purchase his drawings that he hung on the fence.

In 1939, a young white artist/activist for the rights of the poor blacks in Alabama named Charles Shannon came upon Bill Traylor by the side of the road drawing lines with a straightedge and a pencil on a piece of cardboard. Shannon was as fascinated by what appeared to him to be a man encountering pencil and paper for the first time as the man with the pencil and paper seemed to be.

Shannon was an artist who had spent a lot of time working with (on building a cabin) and among the black community outside of Montgomery, and appreciated their strong sense of community and their sensibilities about music and art, that were mainly ignored in the south at that time. So, struck by Traylor’s drive to draw, Shannon provided him with paper, pencils and paint.

Traylor produced simple and boldly colored drawings and paintings of what he saw around him in Montgomery, fellow citizens in daily life, animals and some of what seem to be memories of sharecropping, with cabins, animals and people. There are pictures of lone figures and chaotic scenes populated with buildings, animals and people, all in action.

Shannon collected Traylor’s drawings as he completed them (there’s no record, so it’s hard to know: did Traylor lose interest in them once he had completed the pictures?) and held a show of Traylor’s work at the New South, an organization he founded in Montgomery to support and promote regional culture, mainly the woefully underrepresented black community. [Though mainly an organization to promote the regional culture, it is impossible to separate that from the socio-economic-political issues that the underrepresented South had to grapple with, and that was a large part of what Charles Shannon was interested in – civil rights for all at a time when racism was rampant and condoned in the South.] Though not one of Traylor’s drawings sold during the show, travelers through the south would buy pictures from Traylor, and Shannon would buy whatever did not sell, to help support Traylor.

I first came across Bill Traylor at a show of outsider art at the Terra Museum for American Art in Chicago (sadly, it has closed its museum, though the foundation does still promote their mission in conjunction with other organizations, both in Chicago and nationally), and went back three or four more times to see his drawings again. They are so simple, boldly drawn and colored, but every one just vibrates with life and story. When I look at the figures, they look like what I would attempt to draw if I were trying to convey all the angles and bulges and curves of a person’s (or an animal’s) body in one shot. It’s naïve to try to represent the entirety of a three-dimensional form in two dimensions, but that’s what makes Traylor’s drawings sing. To me. In addition to how unrestrained they are and how vividly Traylor’s sense of curiosity is communicated. And the details! The shoes, the hats (some even look to me like Civil War military hats), and the generous backsides he gave some of his subjects contribute to their vitality.

check out how the toes on this foot look like they're stretching, as if they've just spent a long day stuck inside that boot, chasing turkeys!

Truth is beauty.

There is so much more to this story, to Traylor’s life and experiences and person, as well as Shannon’s, and much of what is known has been collected into the book, Bill Traylor, 1854-1949: Deep Blues, edited by Josef Helfenstein and Roman Kurzmeyer, Yale University Press (ISBN: 0-300-08163-4) , (where all the information and reproductions of Traylor's pictures here come from); not to mention the times in which these men lived and what was going on all around them -- multiple wars, a radical deconstruction of the entire socio-economic structure of the South and the beginnings of its reconstruction, the Jazz Age, the Depression, Louis Armstrong, the Harlem Renaissance, Abstract art, and that’s just a quick list. Bittersweetly, it’s an all-American story, that I am glad to know about.