By Anne Price

December 1986

William Tolliver is that rarest of individuals, a self-taught artist who is rapidly rising to national prominence, not as a primitive or naïve painter but as a sophisticated artist in the contemporary mainstream.

He shares with the naïve artists the ability to re-create a mood, a time and a place as he paints what he knows and gives it artistic strength. But his techniques are far from naïve, and his style combines realism with the abstract, sometimes impressionistic. He is a man who has acquired a vast background of knowledge from a lifetime of avid reading, studying the works of great artists and adapting what he has learned to his own use.

A large collection of his paintings are now on display at Crutchfield’s Live Oak Gallery in Lafayette, where the artist lives. His works are reminiscent of the black experience but are not in any sense identified with protest. They are simply the story of a people and a culture, told from experience tempered with sensitivity and artistic instinct.

His most commanding works are figure paintings depicting people in their everyday pursuits. Musicians, a card player, cotton pickers, a child learning a game, water boys - these are the kind of people Tolliver portrays with affection. His work reflects the matriarchal society, with women always portrayed as strong, loving, in some cases almost as goddesses on a pedestal. Women as mothers, caretakers and friends become his finest subjects.

His use of form and color is astonishing and effective. Human forms are broken into many areas, firmly defined, often with heavy black lines, each area is an elegant mixture of color, sometimes with texture. Each segment blends to form a central image, and the variety of colors become cohesive composition. His ability to use strong and contrasting color in this manner is a vital element of his painting.

Tolliver is a native of Mississippi who went to California to join the Job Corps and move to Lafayette in 1981 to work construction during the oil boom. Although he had painted all his life, he had never offered his work publicly until his wife took two of his paintings to a local art association. He was well received and now paints full time, working 10 to 12 hours a day in his studio, and is represented by Live Oak and has become popular with collectors. When his work was shown in the U.S. Capitol in 1983, every piece was sold.

In September, his work was shown in a collection of paintings by black artists in Los Angeles, and he has been asked to return for a one-man show. Michael Conway, art director at Live Oak, says that people were lined up at the California gallery asking for his autograph.

Tolliver combines a natural sense of color and design with a keen, studious mind, and although his art study has been on his own, he has developed strong techniques. The influence of Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and the Cubists is apparent, but Tolliver’s work is individual., personal, and never reduced to a reflection of another artist.

His work has universal appeal, for although he paints from experiences of the rural South, he touches on the human strengths and weaknesses of all mankind.

Live Oak Gallery is located at 103 Amaryllis Drive in Lafayette.