By Dorothy Sample Shawhan, Patti Carr Black, Tom Rankin, Kim Rushing
Raised in West Virginia, self-taught artist Carolyn Norris (b. 1948) moved as a tender girl of twenty-one to Cleveland, Mississippi, a necessary Delta railroad city at the well-known blues road sixty one. To create one in every of her first work, she tore the wood backpedal a cloth cabinet to exploit as a canvas. She painted with on hand residence paint and accomplished the portray with face make-up. hence all started the belief of a passionate have to paint.
Eventually, Norris got here to function the visible griot of Cleveland. She has used various media, portray on canvas, wooden, paper, cardboard, glass, plates, tiles, sheets, flooring protecting, and mirrors. She additionally makes use of her storage door as an incredible mural chronicling group occasions. In her impressive photographs, Norris indicates day-by-day black existence within the glossy Delta.
Spirit of the Delta comprises a hundred and fifteen colour photographs pulled from Norris's twenty-five years as a painter. Her current paintings has been photographed through famous neighborhood photographer Kim speeding and copies of the works that now not exist were came across every time attainable. The ebook incorporates a biographical essay on Carolyn Norris via Dorothy pattern Shawhan and an essay on her art by means of critic Patti Carr Black, who areas Norris inside self-taught traditions. In an interview with folklorist Tom Rankin, which happened in 1991, Norris explains the centrality of artwork in her life.
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Extra info for Spirit of the Delta: The Art of Carolyn Norris
Sample text
And others, it was a moment that I felt something. And you just got it out. CAROLYN Uhm-hm. It’s like when I wanted to wring Janet’s neck and couldn’t, so I wringed it on that painting. DOROTHY Yeah. The dancing woman. CAROLYN Uhm-hm. And it was all gone. TOM Pretty good therapy. TERRY The one that looks sort of like a voodoo queen, that one? DOROTHY A flamenco dancer? Yeah. TOM TOM What about that Bouncy Floor? Tell me about that painting. CAROLYN I’m still at that painting, ’cause I’m still feeling them bounces.
I guess that was the way I was brought up, you know . . We all got along real well, everybody treated everybody as family, and which I absorbed a whole lot of that when I went home for Mama’s funeral. I will never forget that funeral. She was well liked, she was well respected, and everyone who come up to you will tell you something that she had experienced or they experienced together. So it was not like that. It’s amazing what life will give you. TOM Do you get attached to them? CAROLYN Uh-uh.
Start from there. And it was house paint, though. TOM TOM So the first painting you did was over here. CAROLYN CAROLYN Uhm-hm. This is where I grew up at! Well, you know, what I’m saying is, you mature. You know, you only a child when you leave home, and nobody ain’t told you what’s gonna happen, look like. So you might say I experienced and learned and matured right here in the South. Now that was back—about what? Seventy-three, seventy-two. They go for five dollars, and I didn’t get the five dollars, but it inspired me to do what I had to do.