The Double Vision of Clarence Major, Painter and Writer

Abstract

If double consciousness is a factor in fiction of African Americans, then it makes sense that it would be all so in their practice of visual arts. While writing of African Americans is difficult, working in English, a language with a white |personality' (Major, Dark and Feeling 26), at least African traditions of storytelling survived in slave colonies and evolved into strong, rich African-American modes of vernacular speech, tales, and lyrics. Unfortunately, this was not time to same extent for African traditions of visual expression. Although some examples of African-influenced carvings, pottery, basketry, and ironwork are extant from period, the surviving visual art tradition was |generic, simple, and (almost completely) restricted to areas of dense and recent contact with tropical Africa' (Robert Farris Thompson, qtd. in Fine 17). The Harlem Renaissance of 1920s provided a modem alternative for those seeking a uniquely African-American perspective in all arts, but was primarily a literary and musical phenomenon. It produced muralist Aaron Douglas, and thirties and forties introduced now well-known painters such as Jacob Lawrence, brothers Beauford and Joseph Delaney, Archibald Motley, Lois Mailou Jones, and Hale Woodruff, but their works were not widely exhibited until years later. So, when a young African American of 1940s and '50s, educated in Eurocentric tradition, found himself interested in fine, color, composition, texture, light, and allure of gessoed canvas and creamy paper, sable brushes and viscid paints, he had few directions in which to grow other than along trellis of Western art. Clarence Major was gifted, as his early experiences with both words and paints make clear, and he was endowed with a drive to become an artist. But his consciousness was split by nature of an American of African descent, in an ambivalent political relationship to Western cultural heritage that he was beginning to love, especially as a painter. Based on my experience of Major's paintings and his fiction (Emergency Exit, My Amputations, Such Was Season, and Fun & Games), it is apparent that his career as a writer is due, at least in part, to this early splitting of consciousness in area of his first passion, painting. For years Major deferred, almost even denied, his passion for painting a passion whose nature - obviously Eurocentric and less practical than that of his writing - threatened to alienate him from his African-American community (Necessary Distance 202-05). In a sense, he went underground with his painting and got into habit of seeing through his writing, which was easier to conceal. The painting however, remained a motivating force in his literary work. Major's questions about his own identity as an African American and his relationship to African-American community seem to have led him to become a man of double vision, searching for a colorful but color-blind existence, both through visual image and written word. Major remembers being kind of kid that just gravitated toward visual expression, and he says that painting came more naturally to him than writing. He still recalls entranced by a kindergarten assignment to draw a big, red apple, which he took home and proudly showed to his mother (Major, telephone interview). By time Major was twelve, his paintings were spilling out of his bedroom into family's hall. He won many prizes in school art contests. One of these awards, granted when he was in high school, provided a scholarship to a program for school-age children at Art Institute of Chicago, and he stayed with these lessons until he left home to join Air Force (Major, Licking Stamps 177-79). It was a formative period for Major, not strictly because of scholarship program, but because he also met some regular college- and graduate-level Art Institute faculty and students who encouraged him and provided an even greater level of awareness on his part. …