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(return
to part 2)
But even as House of Blues and all the high-profile
collectors turn to folk art for its refreshing honesty - or because
it is fashionable - the blues-art connection is not new. Scholars
trace it back to the storytelling tradition of the West African
griot singers; the African-American music and visual art
of the South are viewed as mutually descendant from this parent
tradition. James "Son" Thomas (1926-93) is perhaps
the best example of someone who mined both areas: The same Leland,
Miss., juke joint where Thomas played the blues each Saturday
night also displayed the eerie skull sculptures for which he
is now known in Outsider Art circles. Thomas sculpted throughout
his life, showing how music and visual art are - or can be -
two parallel forms of expression.
Still, does a work of art qualify as "visual blues"
merely because it was created by a person of color, or in the
rural South, or without formal training? Paul Thorn's pictures
are among those that come closest to fitting the bill. Thorn,
a singer and songwriter from Tupelo, Miss., draws and paints
from themes recognizable to us as the stuff of blues: temptation,
good vs. evil, the vagaries of man-woman relationships. The 36-year-old
Howlin' Wolf fan made the leap from music to art after meeting
the man he calls the god of all primitive artists, the late Howard
Finster. "[Finster] believed that when he was a young man,
a face appeared on his thumb," said Thorn of his mentor.
"He was a preacher, and it told him to stop preaching and
start painting the gospel. So he took this entire three-acre
lot [Finster's Paradise Gardens in Summerville, Ga.], went to
junkyards, and just got anything he could find and made art out
of it."
The son of a Pentecostal preacher himself,
Thorn walked out of Finster's tumbledown paradise a changed man,
and immediately took up painting. "Whether you believe what
[Finster] believes or not, it's just inspiring to see somebody
want to share what they believe as strongly as he did,"
said Thorn. His next thought neatly summed up the self-taught
artist's credo. "His vision of what he sees is true and
pure to him, and so is mine. So why can't I do the same thing?"
(continue
to part 4)
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