William Tolliver is truly a rags-to-riches story.  Reared in abject poverty he had none of the advantages most people take for granted.  Lacking both education and art supplies, with little encouragement from his environment, the gifted Tolliver had to make do with what he could teach himself from books at the public library.  Now a veritable master of all media, William Tolliver's successful career bears witness to the fact talent can -and will- triumph over the worst of odds.

     "Tolliver is the most talented, most versatile, and most imaginative artist I've ever dealt with," Bob Crutchfield, owner of Crutchfield's Live Oak Gallery, Lafayette, LA, says.  "Though the majority of his most powerful works are expressive realism, he can do everything from photo-realism to abstract art, and do it exceptionally well."

    Michael Conway, art director at Crutchfield's, agrees.  "Tolliver's background has given him a unique extensive artistic vocabulary to draw upon," Conway adds.  "The appeal of his style and subject matter is such that his paintings are invariably sold their first day in the gallery, still wet."

    Tolliver's work is reminiscent of rather than message-oriented, often reflecting experiences from his own past.  Common laborers or field hands, performing their tasks with care and integrity, are a favorite subject.

    Paintings in his Waterboy series, for example, depict a small boy - the young Tolliver, perhaps - in the cotton fields of Mississippi, carrying water to the tired and thirsty field hands.  As was true in his own life (Tolliver was raised by his mother and grandmother, both of whom also worked the cotton fields), the female figures in these paintings often occupy the foreground, while males - usually young boys or old men - reside in the background.  Many of these working people, like Picasso figures, have limbs that have been deliberately enlarged by the artist to evoke the length of a stride or the strength in an arm.  The hands on the figures, gnarled and powerful, are often a portrait in themselves.

  "I paint common people I see every day, people we can all relate to, people working at menial labor," Tolliver says, "but working with pride and dignity."

   Tolliver knows the pride of the physical laborer from personal experience.  "Black people my age will usually deny they ever picked cotton for a living," the 34-year-old Tolliver continues candidly, "but many of us have.  Van Gogh painted people digging potatoes and struck a universal cord.  The people who are picking cotton in my paintings are depicted in a way that is not degrading, but dignifying."

   Tolliver's subject matter may be traditional, but his style, which combines realism with the abstract or semiabstract, is definitely modern.  Though never three-dimensional or prism-like, the background of a Tolliver painting is often cubist in design.  The overall effect of these unique combinations is one of harmony.

    Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1951, the second oldest of fourteen children, Tolliver began drawing in first grade, copying pictures from the Sunday funnies.  By the time he was in the third grade, he was drawing from the Old Testament.  Encouraged by his mother who also loved to draw, Tolliver won many of the "art contests" she conducted to entertain the children.

    "It's unusual for a black mother of my economic background to be teaching her children something like drawing," Tolliver admits.  "When she realized I was even better than she was, it was my mother who introduced me to the art books at the public library."

  Most of what Tolliver learned about art as a youth, a wealth of knowledge comparable to the most formidable formal training, he patiently and industriously extracted from those books.  Other things, like the mathematical relationships between colors in abstract art, he seemed to grasp intuitively.  Natural artistic genius took care of the rest.

   At the age of ten, having further refined his drawing ability through the study of books on the human figure, Tolliver was capturing the attention and praise of all who viewed his work.  Though he never drew for profit, usually giving his drawings away to anyone who wanted them, a member of the Vicksburg First Baptist Church finally insisted that Tolliver take five dollars for a drawing he wanted for the parsonage, and the young man had reluctantly made his first sale.

   By the time he was thirteen, however, Tolliver was tired of realism.  "There was no imagination in my realistic drawings and they began to leave me feeling empty," Tolliver explains.  "What I longed to see was something only a real artist could show me, something from his own imagination.  I found what I was looking for when, at fourteen, I discovered van Gogh."

   Along with van Gogh, Miro, Monet, Paul Cezanne and Picasso provided inspiration to the young Tolliver.  He also admired the works of early American landscape artist, Innes, and modern abstract artist, William Pecuni.  The old master that has always been the most influential, however, is van Gogh.  Like Tolliver, van Gogh painted for the love of art rather than the love of money.

   "Van Gogh painted purely for the love of it," Tolliver says, "and I could relate to that.  I also liked his use of color, the way light was reflected in his paintings, the powerful feeling in his work.  Though I don't always care for his subject matter or the particular feelings certain of his works arouse in me, I have always admired his ability to convey those feelings, to transfer human emotions to canvas."

   A desire to help his mother support his brothers and sisters forced Tolliver to drop out of school in the ninth grade.  Fourteen years old, with just fifty dollars in his pocket, Tolliver left Mississippi for Los Angeles, CA, where he lied about his age to gain entry into the Job Corps.  Tolliver studied carpentry at the government-sponsored trade school for the next year and a half, illustrating the campus newspaper in his spare time.  The move turned out to be a fortunate one in terms of his art: while there Tolliver was befriended by an instructor who was also a painter.

    "I knew so little about painting, then, that at first I simply tried to draw with the paint," Tolliver laughs, "but the instructor helped me with technique and I began to learn."

    Unable to afford even the most minimal art supplies, Tolliver purchased cheap paint-by-number sets at the local five-and dime for the little pots of paint they contained.

   "When I was alone and no one could see me and laugh," Tolliver says, "I actually painted the paint-by-number pictures according the instructions.  That humble experience paid off; it was the way I began to discover how to put colors together.

    It's amazing the things that come along to guide you," Tolliver muses. "That instructor and those paint-by-number sets seemed to open up whole new doors for me."

   Tolliver went to Milwaukee after leaving the Job Corps, moving with another transplanted Mississippian there, and met more artists.  When he wasn't looking for work, which was hard to find, the sixteen-year-old was assisting a sculptor and painting.  A brief, six-month stint in Chicago followed, after which Tolliver returned to Mississippi and a carpentry job.

    "It was while I was in Milwaukee, meeting other artists, that I began to place a higher value on my art," Tolliver says. "Back home again in Mississippi, while all my friends were out partying, I was painting all through the night.  I painted on pasteboard-I didn't know about canvas back then, and wouldn't learn about it till I was twenty and walked into my first art supply store.  I was in another world, imagining what it would be like to be van Gogh."

    Tolliver continued full-time carpentry work, his painting relegated to nights and weekends, for the next several years.   He married in 1977, and in 1981, in an attempt to take advantage of the oil boom, Tolliver moved to Lafayette, seeking construction work to support his family.  Two years after that, when the boom went bust in 1983, he suddenly found himself without a job and dependent upon unemployment benefits.

 "I had a family to take care of and I was worried sick," Tolliver says, "but I tried to think positive and see the opportunity in my situation.  When I wasn't walking the streets of Lafayette, looking for a job, I used the free time for painting and the study of abstract art.

    "I wasn't too fond of abstract art initially," Tolliver admits, "I felt there was something lacking in the medium-feeling, I guess- that people could relate to.  When I began to experiment.  I wanted to build something new, but still based upon the foundation the old masters had laid.  I wanted something different, something combining the old and the new.  That's when I began to experiment with the cubist/abstract background, putting the realist figures in the foreground."

    Despite the family's difficult financial circumstances at this time, Tolliver never considered attempting to sell his paintings. "I couldn't imagine someone wanting to buy a painting from an uneducated artist," Tolliver says, self-consciously, "someone without even a high school degree.  I knew the competition was fierce and I wasn't sure I was all that good, anyway... I just didn't have the nerve to try to sell them."

    Considerably more confident in her husband's ability and the appeal of his work, Tolliver's wife Debrah did have the courage to try.  In the spring of 1983 - two of Tolliver's paintings tucked under her arm- she set off for the local art association. Unfamiliar with the area of Lafayette she found herself in, however, Debrah wandered into a museum, the Art Center for Southwest Louisiana, by mistake.  It was a strange twist of fate that was to lead her to Ms. Francis Love, then curator of the museum, and the start of Tolliver's extremely successful career as a full-time artist.

    Tolliver's extreme shyness and self-consciousness about his background made it a slower start that first year than it might have been.

     Francis Love purchased one of the paintings that first day and wanted more, but she wanted to meet the artist.  "I just couldn't go," Tolliver admits.  "I was too intimidated by the idea of an art museum or a gallery.  It seemed to high and lofty a place for someone like me."

    When Tolliver failed to appear at the museum, Francis Love sent him a message, reiterating her terms that the artist deliver it himself.  Two weeks later, in need of money, Tolliver overcame his shyness long enough to do as she requested.

    "The meeting went well," Tolliver recalls, "and once we started talking about art, I wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as I thought I'd be. She had told Bob Crutchfield, owner of Crutchfield's Live Oak Gallery, about me, she said.  She wanted me to take some of my paintings to him."

    But again, Tolliver was too intimidated by the thought of a formal art gallery-too shy and unsure of himself-to take his work to Crutchfield's gallery immediately. In fact, it was eight months later-when Tolliver had failed to find a job and his unemployment benefits were exhausted-before financial desperation forced him through the front door of Crutchfield's Live Oak Gallery.

     Crutchfield took all eight paintings Tolliver brought with him that first day, and sold them that very week.  Tolliver kept bringing paintings, and they kept selling.

Currently working in a studio-apartment, adjacent to the one he shares with his family and just a short distance from Crutchfield's gallery, Tolliver is a prolific artist.  For him, a typical day begins at 10:30 or 11:00 a.m. and doesn't end until 5:00 the next morning.  During that time he will block-in the color for at least five new paintings and continue work on ten more, all in various stages of completion.  Eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, he says, suit his basic nature.

"I have a lot of physical energy," Tolliver explains. "I'm used to hard, physical labor- construction work and the like - so the mental/emotional activity of painting doesn't easily tire me. But even with the long hours I keep, there doesn't seem to be enough time in each day. I'm on a natural high with every new idea- very, very excited. One idea leads to a dozen more. I get them down as fast as I can, but still so many of them get away. I don't try to pain fast. I'm not trying to turn out X number of paintings each week, it just happens that way."

     To relax between paintings, Tolliver might switch from oils to pastel or watercolors, work with woodcuts, or make preparations for further painting by coating the paper he uses with acrylics to add texture and permanence.

     "I'm always either painting or preparing to paint," Tolliver says.  "When I get tired of what I'm working on, I change styles for awhile.  Do an impressionistic landscape, for instance, or paint a portrait.  And I experiment.  I have images in my mind it seems I will never get down perfectly enough to suit me."

     Though he plans to continue experimenting, Tolliver says he has gone as far as he's going to with abstract art.  While Tolliver's paintings have a strong abstract element, there is nothing jagged or jarring about them.  "I paint paintings for people to live with,"  Tolliver says.  "I know how I feel after a hard days work, and I don't want to come home to something jumping off the wall at me.  I want something serene."

    Over four hundred of Tolliver's oil paintings, pastels, watercolors and woodcuts have been sold since his discovery two-and-a-half years ago.  "Collectors cannot seem to get enough of his work," says Bob Crutchfield.  "The Zigler Museum in Jennings, LA, has amassed a particularly large collection of it."

    Tolliver's work has also found its way to collectors in other parts of the country.  His paintings sold out in Washington, DC in 1983, after being exhibited in the rotunda of the US Senate building under the auspices of Sen. Russell Long.  Another one-man show in Washington, DC is planned this spring, as well as shows in Chicago, Kansas City, and Florida.

    Still a shy, self-effacing individual, success has not changed William Tolliver.  "If I had a million dollars, I'd still be doing the same thing," Tolliver says, "painting." •