Graveside Service
Woodrow Wilson “Woodie” Long (1942-2009), Artist
Tempera on Paper
2006
Woodie Long grew up in a family of twelve in a racially mixed sharecropping community in Plant City, Florida. Woodie grew up moving frequently and working alongside his siblings. His first job was to tote buckets of water to the fields for the plants and the workers. “Daddy always said he paid us three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner.” As a young man, he worked as a sharecropper and itinerant laborer. He said that he had picked just about every crop that existed in the southeastern US.
Most of his life, Long was employed as a professional contract painter. This work took him as far as Saudi Arabia, where he met his wife, Dot. Long said that there he became acquainted with the Prince, now King, while painting the Palace and other Royal buildings. Dot and Woodie subsequently traveled for a year in Southeast Asia before they settled in south Alabama to be near family.
Long began his memory paintings in 1988 while recuperating from a respiratory illness brought on by long-term exposure to oil paint. He was a great story teller, and was often encouraged by family and friends to recount his own experiences. He saw his wife’s hobby watercolor set as a good way to record his memories. Long certainly knew how to handle a brush and during his career had experimented occasionally with painting figures. He once said that on jobs, he often created a large image on each wall before painting over it.
Woody saw his wife Dot’s watercolors and completed three paintings. Dot recognized his innate sense of design and urged him forward. At his first show, thirty six of the forty paintings sold. Woodie’s art is full of spontaneity and fluid color. His subject matter comes from memories of his childhood. Bold imagery and vibrant colors draw in the viewer, while the accessible themes help form a personal connection with the work. His art is now in the collection of many regional museums as well as in the personal collections of notables such as Dan Akroyd, Tommy Lee Jones, and the House of Blues. His paintings have been featured in Smithsonian magazine, The New York Times, and so many other periodicals that Dot struggles to keep track. Woodie Long is found in the upper echelon of folk artists with Mose Tolliver, Jimmie Lee Sudduth, Howard Finster, and Bernice Sims. Experts say there is fine art, and then there is primitive, or self-taught, art. Woodie’s paintings may constitute yet another category: fine primitive art.