Mose Tolliver

"Mose Tolliver (1919-2006) was born near Pintala, Alabama, and attended school through the third grade. After working several labor jobs, in the early 1970s an accident that left his legs crushed prompted Mose to begin to paint while he recovered. At first he painted scenes from his neighborhood and sold them or traded them for food to people passing by. His popularity grew and in 1982 he was included in the seminal “Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980” show at the Smithsonian’s Corcoran Gallery.
He works with ""pure house paint"" on plywood; creating whimsical, haunting and sometimes erotic pictures of wonderfully balanced animals, humans, and flora usually only in two or three hues. Self-portraits with crutches are a repeated image. Tolliver is dyslexic, which may have encouraged his artistic efforts by limiting his reading and writing abilities. He will often turn his paintings upside-down and paint the picture of perhaps an animal and landscape positioned from various directions. Tolliver's titles exhibit a fantastic imagination; ""Smoke Charlies,"" ""Scopper Bugs,""or ""Jick Jack Suzy Satisfying her own Self."" Tolliver's work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia College of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, and the Cocoran Gallery of Art. In 1993, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City. The artist currently resides in Montgomery." [Source: unknown and currently being researched.]

"In the late 1960s, Mose Tolliver was forced to retire from his job in a Montgomery, Alabama, furniture factory after a thousand-pound crate of marble fell from a forklift and crushed his legs. His former employer encouraged him to start painting, and Tolliver began to create images with house paint on pieces of plywood, Masonite, or old furniture. Unable to stand without crutches, he used to sit on his bed to paint, balancing the board on his knees. Recognition came in the 1980s with a solo show at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and a folk art exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, D.C. Tolliver is known for his vibrant images of women, fantasy animals, and religious subjects, and he could paint up to ten pictures in one day." [Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum, https://americanart.si.edu/artist/mose-tolliver-4831]