Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Whatever kind of art you make, I have a question for you. What matters most to you: being in the moment of making? Or the aftermath? And if you feel satisfaction in pleasing someone else with your art or joy in selling it, are those experiences all part of the making or entirely separate things?

See what the late folk artist Helen LaFrance had to say about the relative importance to her.

Penelope Green wrote the New York Times obit on the artist. “Helen LaFrance, a self-taught artist whose vibrant and intimate ‘memory paintings’ of scenes from her childhood in rural Kentucky brought her renown late in life, died on Nov. 22 at a nursing home in Mayfield, Ky. She was 101. …

“In glowing colors and sharp brush strokes, Ms. LaFrance painted church picnics and river baptisms; tobacco barns; backyard gardens with geese and children racing through them; kitchens with bushels of apples and jars of preserves shining like stained-glass windows. Her exuberant scenes of rural life invited comparisons to the work of Grandma Moses, Horace Pippin and other regional painters who drew from their memories to tell stories about a vanished time and place.

‘It’s just a way of reliving it all again,’ Ms. LaFrance told a television interviewer in 2010. The next year she told another interviewer, ‘If I do something somebody likes, well, I’m satisfied because somebody liked what I did, but I don’t think it’s important.’

“The author Kathy Moses Shelton, who, with the gallerist Bruce Shelton wrote ‘Helen LaFrance: Folk Art Memories’ (2011), called Ms. LaFrance ‘an American treasure.’ …

“Ms. Moses Shelton said in a phone interview. ‘She grew up under Jim Crow. She was 10 when the Great Depression hit. Her art doesn’t reflect the pain of that era. … Instead what comes through is joy, and the values of family and work. Her family owned and farmed their own land when sharecropping was the norm, and they were self-sufficient and lived in dignity. Her blend of personal experience, Black American culture and heritage, and her skill all come into play to make her work unlike anybody else’s.’ …

“Helen LaFrance Orr was born on Nov. 2, 1919, in Graves County, Ky., the second of four daughters. Her parents, James Franklin Orr and Lillie May (Ligon) Orr, known as Bud and Hon, grew tobacco and corn.

“Helen did not attend much school. Her parents instructed her in reading and math, and her mother taught her to paint, guiding her hand and helping her mix colors from dandelions, berries and Bluette laundry detergent. She and her sisters worked in the family fields; Helen drew after her chores were done. She recalled loving the smell of the crayons her mother would bring her.

“Ms. LaFrance spent most of her life no more than 10 miles from her birthplace. She worked in a tobacco barn and in a hospital as a cook. She made custom whiskey decanters for a local ceramics company and worked as a retoucher in a photography studio. She owned property, commercial spaces and land.” To read more of the story and to see more art by LaFrance, click here.

And speaking of outstanding, self-taught artists, I never lose an opportunity to point people to a special children’s book about WWI soldier Horace Pippin, here. You will love it.