graphite and colored chalk on cardboard

Bill Traylor
American nationality
Born near Benton, Alabama, in 1854
Dies in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1947
 
Bill Traylor is born a slave on George Hartwell Traylor's cotton plantation. He is illiterate - he will never learn to read or write. After the Civil War and his emancipation, he chooses to remain on the plantation. It is said that he has had twenty-two children. He wife dies in 1938; he moves to Montgomery, where he works in a shoe factory. Suffering from rheumatisms and old age, he retires, becomes homeless and sleeps in the back room of a funeral home.
 
He starts drawing when he is eighty-four years old and spends his days on the sidewalk of Monroe Street. He uses found materials - paper, cardboard, and sides of boxes. The irregularities of their surface become part of his composition. His world is filled with animals, city people in unusual positions, scenes from the farm, disputes, anecdotes and the difficulties of life.
 
In three years, he produces about one thousand five hundred drawings. Some of them bear his name. He makes a pencil outline and then fills his figures with colored pencils or gouache, using basic colors, red, green, black or a particular blue which has become a sort of trademark for Bill Traylor. In 1942, he moves in with his children in Detroit, then in Washington. He is no longer drawing. After the war, he returns to Montgomery, where he becomes ill, and has a leg amputated due to gangrene. He dies shortly after in a nursing home. Nowadays, Bill Traylor's work has become the best known of the American Black Folk Art.
 
SEE ALSO: PATTON (Phil). Bill Traylor, High Singing Blue, Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, 1997.
DANCHIN (Laurent), LUSARDY (Martine). Art Outsider et Folk Art, Des Collections de Chicago, Halle Saint-Pierre, 1999.
MARESCA (Frank), RICCO (Roger). Bill Traylor. His art-His life, Alfred Khnopf, New York, 1991.
 
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