Through the wonderful Mumblelard I saw this photo of Brerfly and her brothers. She wrote:
super heroes are always fighting
My brothers were always playing together and I was left out most of the time. I don’t know why I was standing there, just waiting to get hit, but I do know that I was wearing one of my favorite outfits: snow pants without a shirt during the summer in East Tennessee… Plus that is my bikini bottom on my head.
Brerfly’s childhood photos are transfixing: dynamos arrested in supersaturated color and her smiling, beach scenes that remind me of trips I’d forgotten utterly (and particularly: eating fried chicken in the sand, nursing jellyfish stings, talking to hermit crabs), and so on.
As I was exploiting her memories as a means of accessing my own -and I suppose that’s one v. nice element of memoir, and something to be said in defense of sharing one’s recollections the next time a cultural critic paid by the word constructs an uptown thesis about how ‘society has developed a technologically unilateral communicative dysfunction’ or whatever- I came across her trip to see the work of Howard Finster with her family:
I saw Finster’s work most recently at the High in Atlanta, and in fact posted the image below when I returned to Louisiana; it was one of several I liked so much:
When I saw these pieces, I thought: I really don’t ever want to see anything else until I’ve seen all the ‘folk art’ in the world; folk art seems like art that is still concerned chiefly with meaning, beauty, and expression, rather than the formal and, in my view, absurd & dull considerations that occupy professional artists (like contrived originality, referential commentary, and so on). You don’t need an essay on the wall next to a Finster piece; it speaks for itself.
It was nice to be reminded of such color, in life and in art, on a gray Sunday morning.
