Things Remembered: On Being Human and the Works of David Driskell

Abstract

Things RememberedOn Being Human and the Works of David Driskell Chase Quinn (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 37] It is difficult to name one driving force behind the prolific artist and scholar David Driskell’s artwork. He has explored many different artistic mediums, including wood-prints, oil painting, and collage. He has also mined in a wide variety of subject matter, including nature and landscape painting, most notably in his series of pine tree studies, introspective drawings and self-portraits, and paintings with social justice themes. One aspect of his work that feels essential, however, is his distinct use of layering and color, a vestige of his background in printmaking which he concentrated in as an undergraduate at Howard University in the 1950s. Julie L. McGee points out in her book David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar that indeed “Some Driskell prints have become collage elements in later paintings.” Driskell has said himself, “I’m relying on patterns of color to be the bearer of form.” He insists that it is the colors that urge him to “dig deeper into the surface of the work.” What these disparate elements and influences amount to are a body of work as diverse as the experiences that have shaped the artist, and a style that has earned him comparisons to Romare Bearden, with whom, McGee notes, Driskell not only shares North Carolina roots but also a “mutual devotion to an iconography . . . expressive of black culture.” To that I would add, a black folk tradition. Driskell was born to Reverend George Clyde Driskell and Mary Lou Cloud Driskell in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1931. When he was five years old the family moved to North Carolina where they were sharecroppers on a cotton and vegetable farm fifty miles away from Charlotte. Driskell’s talent and eye for shape and color no doubt were inherited traits. His father, in addition to his ministry, was a blacksmith, whom Driskell has described as an itinerant painter. His mother was a quiltmaker. The influence of his rural upbringing and his enduring appreciation for nature is evident in works like My Father’s Farm, North Carolina (1955), which depicts a green field skimmed by a layer of white cotton. The backdrop is composed of a wall of various trees. The style is far more impressionistic and classical than his later arboreal studies. The seeds of his lifelong passion for education were planted early. While the family could have used his labor on the farm, he was encouraged to pursue his studies. And, indeed, school was a commitment. Charlotte Wilder notes in Down East Magazine, “It took two hours on a winding route to get to a school Driskell could attend, since, due [End Page 38] to segregation, the four schools closest to him were whites only. He would wake up at 4 a.m., be at the bus stop (a mile down the road) by 5, go to class, then ride two hours back home every day.” Even during harvest he remained in school. After graduating from Grahamtown High School in Forest City, North Carolina, Driskell went on to Howard University, the first member of his family to attend college. By the 1950s Howard had become a touchstone for talented black artists, having produced artists and scholars like Alain Locke and James Porter who both made important contributions to the documentation of African American art with their respective publications The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and the Negro Theme in Art (1940) and Modern Negro Art (1943). At Howard, Driskell would come under the tutelage of James Porter, whose influence would lead Driskell to change his major from history to art and set him on a course not only to find his own artistic voice, but also to make preserving and documenting the voices of other black artists a part of his life’s work. While studying at Howard, Driskell also met his wife, Thelma Deloatch, in 1951. After they were married and had their first child, Driskell was hand-picked by artist and educator Loïs Mailou Jones to participate in a summer scholarship program in Skowhegan, Maine...