Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: Making her mark

Clementine, she called herself. Clem-en-TEEN. She is one of the reasons we came this route - to the plantations built along the sunlit banks of the sleepy Cane River region, around Natchitoches (Nak-a-teesh). We could not wait to track down her work.

Clementine Hunter’s maternal grandmother, was a slave. Her paternal grandfather was an “old Irishman”. Clementine lived on plantations around Natchitoches, Louisiana, all her life and for most of that time, worked in the fields: uneducated, illiterate. She went to school for just 10 days in her life.

She moved to Melrose Plantation when she was fifteen, and spent much of her life chopping cotton and picking pecans out in the fields. Way back, the original owner of Melrose had been Marie-Therese Coincoin, a former slave from the Congo, who became a wealthy business woman in Louisiana. Many of the outbuildings she had built in her time remain. They are among the oldest buildings in the country built by slaves, for slaves and are believed to be African in their inspiration. One we photographed was used as a storehouse.

In Clementine’s time, many of the Melrose outbuildings were turned into artist's retreats. Famous artists were regularly invited to stay and produce works in this idyllic little colony along the river. Many left their paints behind. Around this time Clementine had been invited to 'service' in the big house, doing the laundry, making clothes and patchwork quilts, helping out in the garden.

One day, when she was about fifty, Clementine picked up a second hand brush and some used paint left behind by one of the guests. She had the urge, she said, to 'mark some pictures'. She started painting, and never stopped. She painted on old blinds, bits of wood and remnant iron, paper bags, anything that was thrown out that she could turn over, flatten and brush colour on, she painted.

Folk loved them. She gave them away. Strangers soon came knocking on the door of her little cottage at Melrose asking to look at her works. She had always been dirt poor, but, canny, she decided to charge them twenty-five cents to look. As more came she increased that to fifty cents.

It was often late in the day before she could concentrate on marking her paintings. Only after she had completed her other work would she allow herself to paint. She kept no records of works completed, given away, or sold, though some experts estimate her output to be around ten thousand works in her lifetime. Give or take the many who tried to copy her efforts.

All are simple works. They are about the daily plantation life that she observed in her lifetime: cotton picking and pecan harvesting, baptisms, weddings and funerals. They all play a big part in her life and works. Her women tend to be pictorially large. Her men, smaller. She had been a Catholic much of her life, but temporarily became a Baptist once, when she had a disagreement with a priest. She occasionally painted priests or ministers as the smallest figures in her painting — a sign of her disdain for them at the time.

Her works are sunlit, simple and naive, but so detailed they are a wonderful resource of African-American culture. A brilliant record of her life on a plantation. Her reputation spread. In a short while magazines editors came visiting. Critics began calling her the 'black Grandma Moses'. Her fame grew. She continued marking her pictures.

When she was almost a hundred she was granted an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by Northwestern State University of Louisiana. She died two years later, having established herself as one of the finest folk artists in America. Her work was loved and collected by avid fans, museums and art galleries all over the world. Gorgeous pieces, bright, illuminated, unforgettable.

Clementine Hunter

Where Clementine lived at Melrose

African House, at Magnolia Plantation

Her simple bedroom with its simple patchwork quilt

Little scenarios all over the canvas.
About the subjects of her life: washing, cleaning, cooking.

One of my favourites.
Nuns and priests coming from a baptism in a Catholic church.
Her friend's children involved in a Baptist baptism in the river.
Her friend, finding Jesus, on the shore.