BILL TRAYLOR: HIS ART, HIS LIFE - FRANK MARESCA & ROGER RICCO

I’m not quite sure why but Bill Traylor seems to be having a moment. Or, perhaps the Al-Gore-Rhythm decided recently that I wanted to look at way more Traylor (I own a wonderful coffee-table book highlighting American Folk Artist and I’m often stoned and admiring the Traylor pages, but how does/do the machine(s) know(s) this?). Irregardless, I can’t complain, Traylor is amazing. Not unlike other famous, unsung american folk-artists, say Henry Darger, he has an amazing, almost folkloric, biography. He was born a slave, in Alabama, about a decade before the Civil War. He stayed on the land, “working” for the former plantation owners for most of the rest of his life. At retirement age, sometime in his 80s he moved to Montgomery where he was basically homeless and spent all day hanging out on the street and creating these spectacular works of art. I don’t want to dwell too much on his personal life, mostly because I’m worried it will, as is often the case with non-white male visual artists, be the only thing people talk about. I will say that most of the biographical info that’s in this book, comes from a long interview with the artist Charles Shannon who knew Traylor in Montgomery and collected his work. He relays a lot of interesting useful information, we surely owe some part of Traylor’s legacy to Shannon’s preservation. However, the interview is frustrating when they (Shannon and the interviewer) act like no one in the world knows Bill Traylor at all and only Shannon could let us know what he was like. Yet, they also mention his 10 children as well as local kids that hung out with him on the street (there are photos of this) and the people he hung out with on big market days. Any of these people could have given us more context on Traylor’s life and it’s annoying we don’t hear from them. But to the art, it’s glorious. He’s got such a style right from the beginning. Large figures, filled in. His people are always wearing shoes with a little heel and have what I would call a sassy or evocative posse and big asses and bellies. The large pale eye that face the viewer when the characters are in profile, which they almost always are, is also classic Traylor. While he made all of these images on an urban street in Montgomery, one of the largest Southern cities at the time, the images seem to be from his experiences on the farm. Lots of farm animals and farm houses and men sitting around with guns and, my favorite, scenes of folks celebrating and drinking and acting up. Traylor is showing us something really specific and wonderful. These are rural black folks, before during and after the great Migration, getting together and celebrating and drinking and experiencing joy and community. This is exactly the milieu that produces the blues. Looking at Traylor’s work and thinking about, say, Robert Johnson, feels like looking at early 80s train graffiti and thinking about Afrika Bambatta. It’s so hard for an artist to develop a style to the point that it’s unmistakable. How the fuck did Traylor just arrive, as if fully formed. 47 amazing drawings.