From enslaved to outsider artist
Week 44 features Cobalt Blue, Midnight Blue, Charcoal & Buff
Halloween happens later this week and it is the last week of October with “Dog” being the Coloricombo theme so I’ve been looking for a painting of a scary dog to take colours from. If I had planned this month’s prompts differently I could have used terrifying Tiffany, the Cajun hound, from Week 41, but she didn’t really frighten me that much to be honest.
Instead I’m sticking to the South and have taken colours from an American artist who had an incredible life. Born into slavery, he lived through the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration and he just missed the Civil Rights movement.
Self-taught and for a long period of time considered simply as an outsider artist, he’s now regarded as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. Most unbelievably, he only started creating in his mid-eighties.