Garde Rail Gallery, 4860 Rainier Ave S, 721-0107.
Through March 30 (but there are always a couple of his paintings around the gallery; just ask).
Much like those overzealous pregnant women who won't eat anything that isn't the best, most nutritious morsel for their babies, the moralistic art viewer wants every experience to count too much. Every encounter with art becomes a lesson, something to be owned and carried away and jotted down in a leather-bound journal of thoughtful thoughts.
This, I think, accounts for some of the profound condescension surrounding Folk Art (or Outsider Art, Art Brut, Naïve Art, if you like). I have listened to people, in all earnestness, praise the "childlike simplicity" of such work, remark on the "reminder of life's simple joys," the view of the world "unencumbered" by complication--as if such a protective web of words could shield us from the implication that this is work made by poor people with a minimum of education, a minimum of creature comforts, a minimum of access to life's worldly "complications." The lessons are similarly trite, and you know how they go--the stuff of self-help books stacked near the cashier, where you are most vulnerable: appreciate "simple joys"; we only go around once; be thankful for what you have.
I was reminded of this saccharine impulse while enormously enjoying a small show of paintings by Jimmy (variously "Jimmie") Lee Sudduth at Garde Rail Gallery. Sudduth, who recently turned 92, paints predominantly with mud--with the addition of molasses, Diet Pepsi, and house paint--on scrap wood. He is said, depending on the source, to have created a taxonomy of 28 or 30 or 36 colors of mud, many of them from his home state of Alabama. By his own account, he has just about enough schooling to write his own name, and dates his training as an artist to when, as a boy of three, he used to follow his medicine-woman mother on her herb-collecting trips and paint mud pictures on tree stumps.
Art's legends don't come much better than this. You can hardly look at Sudduth's work without engaging in its stories. There are the portraits of his late dog Toto, which he paints daily--a way of maintaining some control over grief without drowning in bathos. There are the portraits of Minnie Pearl--in the current show, her pale face looms up out of the darkness--and musician Larry Adler, as deftly rendered as only a truly familiar presence can be (the figures of Gustav Klimt play similarly with generalization and specificity). Sudduth's vision--from the "frame" he paints on every work to the repetition of subjects--reminds us that sophistication is not entirely the province of graduate students, and that instinct is a powerful tool.
This work, while plain, is hardly simple, in the way that Robert Ryman's work isn't simple just because it's white, or 18th-century Chinese scroll painting isn't simple just because it's selective about detail. Sudduth isn't just painting what he sees; his primary aim is to engage, as anyone who has met him will attest. He wants to chat, to play his harmonica for you, to tell stories. His work travels along similar lines of memory, society, grief, and storytelling. His objects are loaded, painted by one who has seen them--in person, in his mind--again and again, and reduced them to their essences without dismissing their power.
In a book that Garde Rail's Marcus Piña was kind enough to pull out for me, I found elegant evidence of this in another of Sudduth's dog portraits, in this case one in which the shape of the animal is distilled out of the shapes in the wood grain. It's a shifty, there-and-not-there image, and the skill is in the artist having seen it, there in the admittedly humble materials, like a dream that flits past while you are dreaming another dream.
When the inside world discovers an outsider and the outsider looks back at the world, the whole equation tilts, and continues to change. It's an ongoing conversation about what we mean when we say that something is primitive, whether in intent or at the source. Contemporary artists are always invoking the power of primitivism; conversely, it's even possible that a little old uneducated black man is having a good laugh at our expense. Simple... like a fox.
