Happy birthday to the self-taught American master Bill Traylor! Born ca. 163 years ago. Pictured: Untitled (#Red/Orange #Dog), ca. 1939-42. #Tempera and graphite on found #cardboard. 12 x 12.5 in. From the artist's bio on our site: #BillTraylor was born a slave on the Traylor plantation near Benton, Alabama. After emancipation, he worked there as a field hand until he left for Montgomery. During the 1940s, visitors of this black neighborhood would have been treated to a startling sight: in a chair, next to a Coca Cola cooler sat a massive, dignified old man with a drawing board across his lap. He never stopped drawing. Traylor’s life spanned the American Civil War up to the Great Depression, and the scant three years (from 1939 to 1942) in which produced more than 1,200 drawings toward the end of his life were a slight, improbable, window in the history of American art. Traylor created his own extraordinary history of drawing in more than 1,200 images that brought to life a world of chicken stealing, hunting, plowing, preaching, drinking, arguing and testifying, as well as many vivid representations of the animal world. His technique developed rapidly; from the use of simple geometric shapes to complex abstract constructions peopled with multiple tiny figures in motion. The artist’s compositions, especially his “exciting events,” seem not so much straightforward depictions of what was immediately in front of him, as projections extracted from the heart of his vital experience and distilled by memory with a supreme talent for capturing the essence of things with an economy of means. As innocent as Traylor’s art may seem at first sight, his body of work often gives us a harrowing sense of the role of slavery in the configuration of African American identity. Today Traylor’s oeuvre is regarded as one the major triumphs of #SelfTaughtArt. He is featured in numerous publications and his work is in various private and museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum American Art, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and the High Museum of Art. #art #modernart #AfricanAmericanArt #drawing #animalportrait #galleryartists #NYC #RiccoMaresca (at Ricco/Maresca Gallery)
