Jimmy Lee Sudduth

1910-2007 · Fayette, Alabama, USA

He painted with his fingers because brushes wear out, and with mud because Alabama gave it away free in every colour he needed.

The life

Sudduth was born in 1910 at Caines Ridge, Alabama, and raised by adoptive parents who were itinerant farm labourers. His mother practised herbal medicine and taught him natural materials early: his first memory of painting was daubing mud on a tree at the age of three. He worked farms, a grist mill and a lumber yard around Fayette, first exhibited in 1968 at Stillman College, played harmonica at the Smithsonian’s Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife in 1976, and appeared on the Today Show and 60 Minutes in 1980. He died in Fayette in 2007, aged ninety-seven.

The work

Finger-painted pictures in what he made from the ground itself, earth pigments, plants, berries, coffee and soot bound with syrup, sugar, soft drinks or caulk, often alongside plain house paint. He painted local buildings, the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty, self-portraits with his banjo, and again and again his dog Toto. His work is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum and the High Museum of Art.

Why we love them

Dirt, syrup and ten fingers make a complete studio. Sudduth is the cheapest masterclass in materials ever given.

Go deeper

• Jimmy Lee Sudduth at the Outsider Art Fair
• Jimmy Lee Sudduth on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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