Jimmy Lee Sudduth

Art Brokerage: Jimmy Lee Sudduth African American Folk Artist: b. 1910-2007. Jimmy Lee Sudduth (1910-2007) was raised on a farm at Caines Ridge, near Fayette, Alabama. His mother was a medicine woman, part Native American, who frequently took him with her into the woods and fields to search for plants for her herbal remedies. This experience provided him with an extensive knowledge of the flora of Fayette County, which he later used to color his paintings. On one of these trips as a small boy he created his first painting on a treestump, using mud from the surrounding ground. Several days later, they returned to the site and found the mud painting intact. His mother took this as a sign that her son should continue painting: thus began a career that continues to this day. His early works use a medium he calls "sweet mud," a distinctive blend of richly colored local clays mixed with sugary liquids (cola or syrup, for example). With this concoction substituting for paint, he has created works of amazing strength and power--"at once ingenious, charming, witty, and highly observant. Although his Fayette environment was restrictive in many ways, Sudduth's imagination was boundless. His subjects are complex and wide ranging, from people, animals, and situations familiar to residents of west Alabama, to the larger world he knew mostly from popular media. With a wooden panel on his lap and his mud bucket beside him, he captured the images that filled his life, both experienced and imagined. Listings wanted.