Humble Roots

Celebrated Florida folk artist Woodie Long draws inspiration from his past.

by Rheta Grimsley Johnson
photography by Courtland William Richards

SweetTea Journal (Fall/Winter 2006) – It is one of those primary-color days Northwest Florida is famous for—crisp as a starched shirt, lit by a generous sun, the sky as blue as, well, a Woodie Long chicken.

Woodie, a free-spirited folk artist who has been known to paint a chicken blue, savors the grand morning.

“As long as I can wake up beside Dot, paint for a few hours, and maybe go to a Wal-Mart to shop, I’m a happy man,” Woodie says. If he’s not a happy man, content with his lot in life and devoted wife, this former housepainter in blue jeans and a T-shirt is the world’s best actor. Woodie sighs and takes a look around at his home and gallery nestled in the palmetto and piney woods of south Walton County. It’s as if he’s seeing the place for the first time and, yes, finding it quite lovely.

The small black-and-white sign directing you to the Longs’ home from U.S. Highway 98 shares space with an advertisement for a plumber. That humble wooden marker is low-key and unpretentious, like Woodie and his work. It’s only about a mile from the main highway to the folk art gallery the Longs call “Woodie’s Paintings,” but the rambling road the amiable artist took to get here was longer.

Double red screen doors on the porch draw the eye. Out back is Woodie’s garden, a raised bed of impressive cabbages and mustard plants. Inside the house, hundreds of his vibrant paintings fill a shell-white room. The motion in the work is almost dizzying. Fluid figures dance and fly kites, play music and children’s games, fish on the creek bank, and jump on grandma’s feather bed. His jointless people seem to swim in the colors of a perpetual Mardi Gras.

Reading between the lines of the innocent paintings, you’ll find the stories and characters of an austere childhood. Woodie grew up dirt-poor, the fifth child of ten siblings, the shoeless son of a migrant farmer who eventually left his young family. But at least for artistic purposes, Woodie remembers mostly the good. His sharp memory is unfettered by bitterness.

“A lot of people have the same kind of memories I do,”  Woodie says. “That’s why so many folks like my work, I believe. Who hasn’t jumped on a bed?”

Experts say there’s fine art, and then there’s primitive, or self-taught, art. Woodie’s paintings may constitute yet another category: fine primitive art. And he delights in finding himself in the upper echelon of folk artists, with Mose Tolliver, Jimmie Lee Sudduth, Howard Finster, and Bernice Sims.

“The way he paints is almost akin to Chinese calligraphy,” says Montgomery, Alabama, gallery owner Marcia Weber. “It takes an economy of strokes, exactly the right load of paint in his brush to do what he does.”

Weber has been Woodie’s head cheerleader since someone told her about the artist in 1988, soon after he’d begun to paint. She immediately sought him out at his home in Andalusia, Alabama, and at their first meeting, discouraged him from selling his work for a pittance. She also made a friend.

“I look for the same things in contemporary folk art that you do in any other art,”  Weber says. “There must be balance and good composition. I knew instantly that this precious guy had what it took to be really successful.”

Her Montgomery folk art gallery, Marcia Weber Art Objects, is one of only twenty-three establishments across the United States that sells Woodie’s popular work. His paintings have been featured in Smithsonian magazine, The New York Times, and so many other periodicals that his wife Dot struggles to keep track.

Original works of art—on canvas, roofing tin, and wood—hang in prestigious museums and countless classrooms. There are shows from New York to Atlanta. Hundreds of  Woodie’s enthusiasts collect the paintings, which he churns out at an amazingly steady rate, totaling around eighteen thousand so far. Movie stars, country music singers, and New York toy moguls are among his devoted clients, paying anywhere from one hundred to ten thousand dollars for a painting.

“Folk art has a wide appeal to people of all ages because of its focus on subjects such as family, home, memory, and tradition,” according to Shari Abelson, arts program coordinator of the Rye Arts Center in Rye, New York. A recent exhibition at the gallery included some of  Woodie’s work.

“Bold imagery and vibrant colors draw in viewers, while the accessible themes help form a personal connection with the work,” Abelson says.

Woodie’s only problem? Slowing down. “I’m trying to practice my banjo, so I won’t paint all of the time,” he allows. Dot frets about paint fumes irritating her husband’s fragile lungs and hypersensitive eyes. He loses all track of time when he paints, and she patiently diverts him.

“I can’t stand it when there’s a board or a canvas that hasn’t been painted,” Woodie says. This week he’s collecting a carpenter’s plywood scraps from a small construction project in his own yard. They won’t be unpainted for long.

Woodie is a cheerful workhorse of a Renaissance man. He loves bluegrass music and organic gardening. He swears by Chinese herbal teas and acupuncture treatments that helped his eyes when nothing else seemed to work. His chief passions are painting, of course, and his natural beauty of a wife.

Woodie and Dot have been together three decades, but you’d never guess it. He compliments her at the drop of a hat; she protects and encourages him and works hard to productively channel his childlike enthusiasms. It’s Dot who handles the business, coordinates the shows, and shelters the artist from constant interruptions.

“I may not want to do this forever, you know,” Dot says in a mock grumble. Woodie doesn’t look too worried.

Theirs is a remarkable love story.

Woodie was born in 1942 in Florida’s Plant City, but soon lost count of the places his big family lived while trying to eke a living from sandy soil. When he was three, his father was sharecropping five acres of strawberries. Woodie’s 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, dinner, and supper.”

Nobody was ever hungry or cold or particularly unhappy, as Woodie remembers it, until his father moved the family to the Tampa projects and left them soon afterward. Woodie was fourteen, virtually unschooled, and seemingly destined for a life of blue collars and subsistent paychecks. He enrolled in school for a while, but soon quit to help his mother support the large clan.

Woodie bounced from job to job until the 1970s, when he became a housepainter, a profession he happily stuck with for eighteen years. Along the way there were two failed marriages, a baby from each, and many lean times. But Woodie never worried about starving, not as long as there were blank walls to wash with paint. Some days he’d even show up early and paint storybook scenes on unlikely industrial canvases, the sides of buildings or battleships, knowing full well his efforts would soon be sandblasted or painted over.

In 1976 he got a break, moving to Saudi Arabia at the behest of a brother to head a construction team of two thousand workers. While renovating an old palace, he met young Dot Godlewski, the daughter of an Army Corps of Engineers member from Philadelphia. Educated, artistic, and worldly, she had grown up frequenting Philadelphia’s art museums and other cultural offerings. Woodie and the adventurous young Dot—who once hiked across Afghanistan—fell in love. Soon they were back in the United States together—painting houses, odd-jobbing, gardening, and generally scraping by.

“They were really an odd couple,”  Weber remembers.

The unlikely pair bought a home and five acres near some of Woodie’s kin in Andalusia. The house was unpainted with outdoor plumbing and no air-conditioning. They were reasonably content.

Dot and Woodie enrolled in a local junior college, swapping painting jobs for their tuitions. She took art classes—framed, competent watercolors on the bedroom wall are colorful reminders that she was the first artist in the family—and he played banjo in a school ensemble.

Life thrummed along happily until 1988, when back problems ended Woodie’s lengthy house-painting career. For the first time in his life, he worried about how to support himself and his family.

He found himself laid up—blue, bored, and trying desperately to explain his upbringing to his daughter who had written to ask for family history. Woodie tried writing down some of his experiences, without much success. Words on the page didn’t do his colorful past justice.

One day while Dot was in town, Woodie picked up his wife’s paintbrushes and proceeded to tell his stories in paint. He knew paint. He knew color. By chance, he had seen a demonstration on abstract art once in Dot’s classes.

When Dot got home, three paintings were lined up on the porch swing for her to see. She calmly took her brushes and handed them to her husband. “You’re an artist,” she said.

An art instructor Dot summoned from the junior college agreed, and thus began Woodie’s new life as a folk artist. His was a meteoric rise. At the end of academic semesters he’d rush over to the junior college and collect the scrap canvases left by the students. He didn’t sketch anything first. His control was so great, there were no culls. His first show sold out.

“I’d only been painting a few months before my work was in a literature book,” he says. The response was mind-boggling for the artist, and sometimes for his former customers.

At funerals and family reunions, people whose homes Woodie painted in the past ask him to come by and sign a room. “They all want to know if I’d painted anything on their walls before covering it.” Woodie cackles. He has fun with his celebrity.

Gregarious Woodie can laugh at himself, and also at the amazing trick the fates have played on a simple man from the rural South. When an art critic compared his Around the Mulberry Bush to a Matisse titled La Danse, Woodie says he was livid. “Who is he? I’ll whup his ass.”

You might suspect that story is apocryphal, but not if you’ve met the guileless Woodie.

“Woodie’s work … always has a sense of his ‘eternal child,’ ” says collector Robin Blocker of Decatur, Georgia. She and husband Ted hung his School Bus and Girls Flying Kites in their ten-year-old daughter’s room, “where they make us smile.”  Veterinarian Doug Hawkins of  Troy, Alabama, who has amassed a huge collection that includes some of  Woodie’s earliest paintings, says he would grab those first if his house caught fire. Such glowing testimonials from collectors reflect a growing international audience for folk art.

Woodie and Dot have used some of their income to build an impressive art collection of their own, mostly primitives by artists who are now dear friends. Woodie even initiated a collaboration project, driving his van from town to town, hand-delivering plywood boards with sections marked off for various southern folk artists to paint. Those ensemble paintings and others in a remarkable collection are housed in a second gallery in Florala, on the Alabama-Florida line.

Riding this roller coaster of a life, Woodie has held fast to his humble roots; he reveres them. Storyboards in his shaky hand and funky grammar explain his layered past: “One time my brother Rosco found a rope. When he got home there was a Cow on the End of it.” These boards hang all over his Florida gallery. Woodie won’t sell them.

Woodie is emotional when he remembers his mother, who died in Florida just as her son’s art star was ascending. As she lay dying, she said, “I’m so sorry I let you children down.” “I told her, ‘You never let me down,’ and she didn’t.”

He only wishes she could see him now, using as artistic fodder the happy memories of a rich, if impoverished childhood.

The sad recollection is over, and Woodie is laughing again. “Someone asked me at a show once, ‘Why is that chicken blue?’ I told ’em, ‘That chicken’s had a bad day.’ ”

As for Woodie, he doesn’t have bad days anymore.