Alabama painter Jimmy Lee Sudduth, known for his genial personality and his paintings made with mud pigments, died September 2, 2007, at the Fayette Medical Center.

Jimmy Lee Sudduth was born March 10, 1910 in the community of Caines Ridge near Fayette, Alabama, the son of a man named Wilson but was adopted by the itinerant field hands Alex and Balzola Sudduth. Years later Sudduth told of following his mother into the fields and woods as she gathered plants with which to make herbal medicines. There he learned about natural substances and began to draw with dirt on trees and stumps. As an adult, he searched for a binder to make his mud paint stick; the breakthrough came when he saw syrup splash onto the ground and then onto a tree - and stay there. Working at various manual jobs during the day, Sudduth painted at night using house paint; plant juices; and mud of different colours bound with sugar, syrup, molasses, or Coca-Cola. He also coloured his paintings with virtually any substance that came to hand. He gained attention in the late 1960s with a series of local exhibitions followed by appearances at the Smithsonian Institution's Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife and the Today show. Since then he has received state arts awards and has appeared in dozens of solo and group exhibitions and thousands of private and public collections. Sudduth painted well into his nineties, appearing at his last beloved Kentuck Festival of the Arts in October, 2005.

A prolific painter, Sudduth produced most of his finest work during the 1970s and 1980s. His best paintings boast surfaces of subtle colour and rough, rich texture. Their meaning is occasionally spiritual, but more often they glorify his visual surroundings, featuring big machines; still lifes; the likenesses of friends, celebrities, and himself; architectural renditions that displayed a sure command of one-point perspective; and animals - especially depictions of the series of dogs he named Toto.