Part 2 of 2
Sam Ezell, a maintenance man at Hillsborough’s Daniel Boone Village, has collected folk artist Bernice Sims’ art for many years. “She is the living Grandma Moses,” he said.
Sims, 84, paints scenes from memory of the rural South: baptisms, hog killings, civil rights protests. When her son died about three years ago, she asked Ezell if he would be like her son and look after her from time to time. She told him to go home and paint her a painting. Ezell told her he couldn’t paint a wall.
But he went home and did a painting for her. “It didn’t look nothing like what I was looking at, but it was the best I could do,” he said. And he kept painting.
Folk artists traditionally have been poor, black artists without formal training, Gutlon said. They told stories through their art.
Today, the definition has expanded. Ezell’s bright, colorful flowers, animals and people with “Mr. Bill” faces are a hit at arts shows, where his small paintings start at $45. He brought 150 canvases to a three-day show in Atlanta and sold 130.
“I don’t know,” he said, when asked to explain their popularity. “They’re cheerful. They’re really good for kids’ rooms.”
He makes his frames from culled plywood, stretches his canvases over two-by-fours, primes and paints.
Sometimes it’s just Ezell and his 22-pound cat Buddy. The cat drops a little ball for Ezell to throw down the hall a few times.
“I looked down at him one day, and he was the same color as the painting,” Ezell said. “I’d dropped paint all over him.”
Sims saw Ezell’s promise.
“He painted flowers, then a man with a hat, and it was really good,” she said from her Alabama home Wednesday.
The oldest of 10 children, Sims started painting at 9 or 10, carefully squeezing paint from a tube a neighbor bought because her family couldn’t afford it.
Sims told Ezell to paint the pictures in his head, not to copy the subjects that other people painted.
“I feel like I’m passing a little something on for the youngsters who haven’t seen these things,” she said. “Many kids have never been in a garden patch.”
Now Ezell is passing something on.
For “Marry Durham,” he painted buildings with labels like Liberty Warehouse, where as a kid he’d watch tobacco he had brought in from the fields with mules get sold. Or the Kress Building, where he’d get banana splits at the basement soda fountain.
He was painting at the Outsider gallery recently when a girl about 11 years old started watching him.
He leaned over and pointed to some brushes. When she finished her painting, a little red convertible, and Ezell told her it was hers to keep, she started to cry.
“Momma, look at this,” she said. “Look what I made; it’s mine.”
“She had tears running off her jaw,” Ezell said. “She told her mother, ‘I wish Daddy could see this.’”
“He’s up in heaven looking at you, girl,” the mother replied. “He can see it.”
