Bill Traylor: High Singing Blue
By Fred Camper
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Traylor’s story is the classic, almost defining tale of the outsider artist. Born a slave on a small Alabama plantation, probably in 1856, he lived there most of his life as a farmhand. Later in his life he recalled doing basket weaving and some surveying as well as farming. By the 1930s his “white folks” had died, and after a short stint in a Montgomery factory, he found himself unable to work due to rheumatism. He began receiving a small relief check and sleeping by night in a funeral parlor, living on the streets during the day. One day in 1939 he took a piece of cardboard and began to rule lines on it with a stick; the next day he was drawing “rats, cats, cups, tea kettles, and other silhouetted shapes,” as artist Charles Shannon, who had seen Traylor that first day, befriended him, and collected his work, put it in a 1988 article. Passersby would occasionally see Traylor’s art and purchase it for small change; during Traylor’s lifetime Shannon mounted two exhibits. When Shannon was drafted in 1942, Traylor went to live with some of his children (he had more than 20), and his drawing career largely ended; most of the approximately 1,500 drawings that survive were thus made in three years. After Traylor’s death in 1947, Shannon put the drawings away; only in the late 70s did he exhibit them again, launching Traylor’s posthumous “career.”
No one knows what Traylor had in mind for his art. Shannon reports he would sometimes tell little stories about the pieces he was working on. He said of one mule, “He’s sullin. He won’t work. Minute he sees a plow he start swingin’ back. You can’t make him go. Gits that pride from his mama.” Traylor often recounted fables about animals; it’s thought that he drew most of them from memory, though he admitted to getting some from circus posters. Traylor’s many drinking scenes are also said to have come from memory–his own long life provided much of his inspiration. Some critics have cited African influences–and works like Man With Large Dog on Leash, in which the man is dwarfed by the giant beast he’s leading, do suggest Traylor saw human beings and animals as closely linked, in contrast with the European view of animals as lesser beings. Other critics have compared Traylor to musicians, specifically the legendary Delta blues singer and guitar player Robert Johnson, who was killed at 27, the year before Traylor began painting.
Some of the 30 pieces at Intuit are unabashedly sexual. In the interlocking curves of Dancing Couple, the man’s right leg is thrust forward into a fold in the woman’s dress. Also bringing them together are Simon’s vibrant, changeable colors: the red and blue of his striped pants don’t quite match the red and blue splotches on his orange shirt; her dress is a riot of multicolored stripes filled with little Xs. But there’s more order here than there seems at first–each group of Xs is the same color as an adjacent stripe–and such subtle orderings give her wildly colored images some unity.
