Farewell, fingerpainter

Intern Amber Peckham remembers outsider artist Jimmy Lee Sudduth.

As a sixth grader on a field trip to Washington DC, I was fortunate enough to see one of Jimmy Lee Sudduth’s works, Fantastic Building, on display at the Smithsonian Institute. It was the only painting that lingered in my mind on the long drive home, simultaneously conjuring up fond memories of sand castles and horrific daydreams of prisons and boarding schools.

Fantastic Building, c.a. 1970’s, Smithsonian Institute

Intrigued, and mildly bored once summer came, I decided to further explore Sudduth’s work and was amazed by the depth of his innovation. To keep his mud paint from crumbling off the plywood he used as canvas, Sudduth mixed it with sugar, honey, and even diet Pepsi, and to color the mud he used herbs and flowers from the woods around his home, where he spent most of his youth in the company of his medicine-woman mother. He painted using only his fingers and claimed to have discovered 36 different kinds of mud in his home state of Alabama.

Even more delightful to me than his unique style and life history, however, were the scenes he painted of rural life: tractors; farm dogs; and big-haired, fat, white women who looked familiar to a girl growing up in rural Indiana. Here was no fractured Picasso or blurry Monet, just a guy mixing mud with Pepsi and smearing it on plywood to create lasting images of the things he loved. Primitive, yes. And untrained? Most definitely. But also accessible and beautiful.

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Jimmy Lee

Sadly, Sudduth died on September 2 at the age of 97, in the Fayette Medical Center in Fayette, Alabama. One of the last of a generation of great Southern “outside artists”, or artists without formal training, Sudduth’s passing is a loss to the folk art community – and to me.

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