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拍品专文
Bill Traylor was an American prodigy. Born into slavery, illiterate all of his life, he worked on the Traylor plantation in Benton, Alabama, for over 70 years and then for a year in a Montgomery shoe factory until his rheumatism prevented him from continuing. He slept nights on a pile of rags in the back room of a funeral parlor and during the day he set up on Lawrence Street in front of a pool hall where the overhanging roof gave him protection. Then, at age 84, Bill Traylor began to draw, working on discarded cardboard with a small straight stick, a pencil and cast off poster paint. In just over three years, in the shade of the tin roof behind a red Coca-Cola cooler, he produced an estimated 1,200-1,500 works, on some of which he painstakingly learned to write his name.
The subjects of his drawings illustrate his life just as the manner of his pencil stroke reflects his untaught circumstance. Yet his drawings show an unerring ability to invent complex and harmonious compositions and to make brilliant use of negative space. Contrasted to what appears to be ignorance of perspective and shading is a highly sophisticated and original approach to shape, geometric design and abstract form. His approach to the page, to the old cardboard surfaces he found and his incorporation of scratches, discoloration, tears and irregular shapes of his boards reveal a compositional master at work. From the age of 84 to 87, Bill Traylor produced a body of work which is as American and as important to America's artistic contribution as are the scrupulously exquisite watercolors of Winslow Homer or the structured paint drippings of Jackson Pollock.
What we know of those years and of Traylor's life is described with simplicity and vividness in an interview with Charles Shannon, [long seen as] Traylor's discoverer. The details of his life, as relevant as they are to the subjects he depicted or the events he drew, do not account for the basic sophistication of the depiction nor for the consistently high quality of the drawings.
– W L-D.
Excerpted from Bill Traylor: Observing Life (Ricco Maresca Gallery, 1997).
The subjects of his drawings illustrate his life just as the manner of his pencil stroke reflects his untaught circumstance. Yet his drawings show an unerring ability to invent complex and harmonious compositions and to make brilliant use of negative space. Contrasted to what appears to be ignorance of perspective and shading is a highly sophisticated and original approach to shape, geometric design and abstract form. His approach to the page, to the old cardboard surfaces he found and his incorporation of scratches, discoloration, tears and irregular shapes of his boards reveal a compositional master at work. From the age of 84 to 87, Bill Traylor produced a body of work which is as American and as important to America's artistic contribution as are the scrupulously exquisite watercolors of Winslow Homer or the structured paint drippings of Jackson Pollock.
What we know of those years and of Traylor's life is described with simplicity and vividness in an interview with Charles Shannon, [long seen as] Traylor's discoverer. The details of his life, as relevant as they are to the subjects he depicted or the events he drew, do not account for the basic sophistication of the depiction nor for the consistently high quality of the drawings.
– W L-D.
Excerpted from Bill Traylor: Observing Life (Ricco Maresca Gallery, 1997).