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Clementine Hunter

Jennifer Moses writes a beautiful travel piece for The New York Times, about the paintings of Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter — and how Hunter’s work taught her to see the world in a new way: Who knew, indeed, that the $5 and $10 primitive paintings that some of my Baton Rouge friends were given […]

Jennifer Moses writes a beautiful travel piece for The New York Times, about the paintings of Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter — and how Hunter’s work taught her to see the world in a new way:

Who knew, indeed, that the $5 and $10 primitive paintings that some of my Baton Rouge friends were given as children would now be worth thousands and owned by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Joan Rivers, not to mention many public collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art. That an illiterate fieldhand born two decades after the Civil War would not only record a way of life that she watched disappear, but also spawn a new appreciation for the work of self-taught artists? It strikes me that only someone who herself was overflowing with life and humor would say about herself: “I’m not an artist, you know, I just paint by heart,” and about her own more abstract work, commissioned in the 1960s: “Those things make my head swell.”

But then again, when I moved to Baton Rouge in 1995, after having spent my life on the East Coast, my own head swelled, or perhaps spun would be a better word, as I had yet to learn how to take in my new, deeply religious Southern world. But by gazing long enough at the joyous and astonishing art of Clementine Hunter, I eventually grew a better set of eyes.

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