JIMMY LEE SUDDUTH:  A brief biography
Jimmy Lee Sudduth is so well known that he hardly needs words of introduction. He has lived all his life in and around the town of Fayette, Alabama, many of those years with his late wife, Ethel. Without question, the artist is the best-known resident of the town and it would be a rare person on the street who could not direct a stranger to Jimmy Lee's home.

The artist produced works of art all his life, he says, and even as a child remembers making drawings in the dirt. He also recalls creating something of an environment in his younger days--carved wooden doll-like figures that surrounded the porch of the house where he then lived, just outside Fayette.

The first public exhibition of the artist's work took place in 1968 at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, not in Fayette in 1971, as has been written several times.

Jim Sudduth is best known for his paintings done with earth pigments, mixed as he saw fit, with house paint and/or various leaves and occasionally berries for color. He always claimed to be able to obtain 36 colors from the dirt and rocks he gathered from the surrounding area. These pigments were applied by the artist with his forefinger and thumb to plywood panels, old boards, doors, and salvaged materials from demolished buildings. In these "mud pictures" the artist over the years experimented with a variety of materials searching for a bonding agent that would cause the mud to adhere to the board--sugar, soft drinks, instant coffee, caulking material, etc.

In 1990-91, however, the artist, no longer physically able to collect the natural materials he had traditionally used for pigments, turned to acrylic paints purchased for his use and applied with a little sponge brush. The sizes of the boards on which he painted became standard: 24 x 24", 24 x 48, and on rare occasions even 48 x 96, a full-size sheet of plywood. The boards are generally given a standard coat of flat black paint before the artist begins his work. The results are startlingly different from the traditional finger-painted works of the earlier period.

Jimmy Lee Sudduth has over the years demonstrated masterful handling of a rich repertory of subject matter: various animals, especially dogs; farm and domestic activities, but not really handled in the fashion of a memory painter; portraits of persons of no specific identity, what I call inner portraits; portraits of real persons, both contemporary and historical; flowers; houses, from humble cabins to columned mansions and all in between; public buildings, especially the Fayette County Courthouse; cars, ships, and trains.

Although he has been called a visionary painter, I see little, if anything, in the work that would justify that designation unless we call all art visionary.

Robert Cargo