| Existing comment:
It is uncertain when Bill Traylor began drawing, but his earliest known works -- rudimentary drawings done in pencil -- were made in early 1939, when he was around eighty-six. After decades of farm labor, the aged Traylor was spending days drawing near a blacksmith shop and lodging nightly at a funeral home in the segregated black business district of Montgomery. In these first drawings, Traylor takes stock of the world around him, documenting hand tools, objects, animals, and people, and learning how to organize pictures as records and tell stories. |