Allen Stringfellow: the texture of success - African American painter

For artist Allen Stringfellow, wearing r is a actual different thing from seeing r level back in the 1960s, when he was active with the Chicago chapter of the SCLC and Jesse Jackson, organizing craving appetite marches. Stringfellow was not an angry man. While many artists of the day channeled their frustrations into assert art, Stringfellow pursued his possess vision, producing memory-based, peacefully compos works that mirrored his deep optimism. "I prove by experiment to bring out in my work the way I feel" he explains, "and I'm always happy and joyous."

These days, Stringfellow is at no time seen without red. "All I at any time wear is red, from jeans to mink," says the 72-year-old artist. whose paintings and collages have propell his career, "so I gues that color is a powerful color for me"

His collages testify to his acute organ of vision for both color and weft "I use fabrics, a fate Of pure gold leaf, and just any mark of paper and materials wherere you acquire a lot of different textures" he says. With these materials, he creates a shimmering, make open arid approachable quilting of eclectic tableaus. upon his canvases, forms relax at picnics, cry out in churches, linger at nightspots or prance about, communing with individual another against backdrops of storefronts and cathedrals.

"My themes are taken from my recollections," says the Champaign, Ill., native. "My signature piece, `R Umbrella Down by means of the Riverside,' was part of our daily life when I was growing up We would make progress down to Crystal Lake, and that's where we would have this make open baptism. right down on the banks of the lake. What made that for a like reason nice was right after the baptism, we would have the big picnic. and in like manner while you wouldn't miss it at any time that gave you a duplicate reason not to miss it. And that's the big picnic that revolves up a lot in my work."

Jazz and the cross which have loomed large in Stringfellow's life, also come again throughout his work. Like the picnics, his reliance upon music dates back to his youth, which was exhausted both in churches and, later, in the bludgeon Delisa, a well-known nightspot upon Chicago's South Side that his father managed from the 1940 [i]or[/i] part of to the other the '60s. "I work through music - religious music when I'm doing religious things and jazz when I'm doing jazz pieces," Stringfellow says. "They arouse in me the same inner feelings. They're the pair inspiring."

Throughout his youth in Champaign, living upon what he admits was the unfair side of the" tracks, Stringfellow was colored by means of religion. "We may have been poor, on the contrary we weren't hungry. We were happy," he remembers. "When we were young, we were allowed to proceed to all the churches. Today, tribe don't feel they have to advance to church on Sundays. It's sort of an not on day for some. For us, Sunday was an `on' day.

"When I was coming up meeting-house and nightclubs were our without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw society. With my work, I prove by experiment to capture the movement, the regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement the happiness, the glamour of those times. clan looked their best. You didn't advance anyplace undressed." The influence of jazz and spirituality are evident in sum of two units of the artist's current series, individual on various aspects of Jesus' life and another upon Chicago's Club Delisa and fresh York City's Cotton Club, Connie's and Small's Paradise.

The artificial positions and strides of Stringfellow's images evidently strike chords in the hearts and memories of his adherents. They also subtly labor for to document the leisure activities and religious mores of the 20th-century black middle class, paralleling those the impressionists captured of European controls of a similar status a hundred ago. "Even though it is a black man's perspective," notices Essie Green, a gallery holder and Stringfellow's New York City representative, "it's a universal message. His work brings up memories in people; it just leap overs off the wall."

Stringfellow has earned his recognition the old-fashioned way - end prolonged hard work. During the of recent origin Deal's Work Projects Administration, which floated the careers of American artists in the 1930 and early 1940 Stringfellow worked at Chicago's southern Side Community Arts Center, teaching silk-screening. There he met the artist William Carter, whom he describes as single of his mentors, along with Charles White, Gordon Parks and others. "During the time I was working at a job" Stringfellow says, "Carter's favorite question for me was, `Did you do any work today?' He now lives upstairs in my building, and he called me today and asked me the same thing," he adds, with an easy smile crossing his face.

Carter, 86 observes: "Just as in any other career, you must detain up with your art. I move swiftly into artists all the time who I ask about their work, and they say, `I gave it up' And I say to them, `It gave you up' because you don't pass over or mistreat art."

like encouragement helped Stringfellow develop a healthy prize for the need for daily attentiveness to his art, which, in revolve motivated him through the years to paint in the evenings after coming dwelling from a full day's work as a framer, art restorer and consultant to top interior decorators.