Teaching kids about outsider art feels like a no-brainer to me. Which is to say, why doesn’t it happen more often? Perhaps there’s a feeling that educating kids on the self-taught is ultimately self-defeating. Can’t say as I agree, of course. Seems to me that learning about the great outsider artists could give a kid a kind of hope. This is particularly true in the case of Bill Traylor. Here you have a guy who lived a whole life, discovered an artistic calling near the end, and remains remembered where before he might have been forgotten. It makes for an interesting lesson and, to my relief, and even more interesting book. In It Jes’ Happened Don Tate and R. Gregory Christie pair up for the first time ever to present the life and art of an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times.
He was born a slave, Bill Traylor was. Around 1854 or so Bill was born on a cotton plantation in Alabama. After the Civil War his parents stayed on as sharecroppers. After he grew up Bill ran a farm of his own with his wife and kids, but when Bill turned eighty-one he was alone on the farm by himself. With cane in hand he headed for Montgomery. It was there that he started drawing, for no immediately apparent reason. He’d draw on cardboard or discarded paper. After a time, a young artist took an interest in Bill, ultimately showing off his work in a gallery show. Bill enjoyed it but for him the drawing was the most important thing. An Afterword discusses Bill’s life and shows a photograph of him and a piece of his art.
When you’re writing a picture book biography of any artist the first problem you need to address is how to portray that person’s art in the book. If you’re the illustrator do you try to replicate the original artist’s work? Do you draw or paint in your own style and include small images of the artist’s original work? Or do you show absolutely none of the original art, trusting your readership to do that homework on their own? There is a fourth option, but I don’t know that I was aware of it before I read this book. You can hire an illustrator whose style is similar enough to the original artist that when the time comes to reference the original art they make their own version and then show the artist’s work at the end.
Now I’ll go out on a limb here and admit that I’ve never really been a huge fan of R. Gregory Christie’s style before. It’s one of those things I can appreciate on an aesthetic level but never really personally enjoy. Yet in this book I felt that Christie was really the only person who could do Traylor’s tale justice. I had initially wondered why he had been chosen (before reading the book, I might add) since author Don Tate