Jim Sudduth

Jimmy Lee Sudduth

Alabama (1910 - 2007)

"Sudduth is an artist who paints with mud, using a process that he says he discovered more than 80 years ago, when as a 4-year-old child, he used a fistful of mud to draw a dog on a sawed-off tree stump. Over the years, he has refined this process in many ways, most notably by adding a variety of other natural and man-made ingredients to his mud mixture to make it more adhesive and to vary its color.

Sudduth has had no formal art training. For most of his life he supported himself and his family by farming and working at other manual-labor jobs, and he sometimes performed in public as a blues harmonica player.

In the late 1970s and the '80s - a period that saw a rapid increase of interest in the work of self-taught artists; Sudduth's engaging personality and his musical performances helped attract attention to his rawly expressionistic painting, and he became one of the most widely known exponents of this loosely defined genre.

His prolific output seems to result from the pure pleasure he takes in painting."

Tom Patterson
Winston-Salem Journal

Playing the blues with Toto II

Creative Heart Gallery
PO Box 476
Newport, Rhode Island 02840
Phone: 401-847-0991
Fax: 401-847-8498
george@self-taughtart.com

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