I never seen him do it but my sister saw it. My uncle like to paint birds and stuff on the wood. I asked my sister why he was kept like that and she say he was an artist. The police came for him a couple of times. She say my uncle tried to do what he call "turn old wood into new wood." I knowed something was weird about my uncle, my grandmother kept him in a place, like, locked up. I don't remember art being made by any of them, but I asked my sister a few years ago and she told me stuff. Goodbread Alley had a lot of people from the islands living around it. A lot of people are locked up, struggling. There's a lot of stuff in my paintings people wanted to ask about back then. Some of the people that came to Goodbread Alley, they seemed to understand my paintings. But every time I turn around you're in the newspaper." A friend of mine-he's passed away now-say to me, "I look at your paintings but I don't see nothing. Some liked it, some of them admired me, some didn't. Some of them said I was mad, some cursed me out, some said I was sick. A lot of black people seen them but they didn't say much to me about it. Some people would say stuff, say I looked like Gauguin, all different artists they say I looked like. Sometime they would buy a painting right off the wall, put it in their car and drive away. After about two years people started driving in there to see the alley. I didn't care if my friends take them, I just put another one up. I put a lot of early ones away, but a lot of them just disappeared. Sometime people would come swipe the paintings. Sometimes I dragged old crates down, you know, those moving crates. People told me that if I did that in another country, I'd have disappeared.Įvery day I came and find wood, you know, and put it up on a wall and paint it there in the alley, right off main street, 14th Street. It was up to me to put up how I feel about stuff, like the protesters did. Things like that, it made me want to express my feelings. They was just a bunch of old wooden houses, all looked alike. And they built apartments to take the place of the shotgun houses. But they all looked alike, you know, and the city had a problem with that, and tore the houses down.
Some people took good care of their houses. Shotgun houses used to be all around that place.
#ARIES YOUNG SOULS MOVIE#
A movie called Bucket of Blood was made about it, I hear. Police wouldn't go into that place back then. There's alleys all around that neighborhood. One day I looked in a magazine and seen the way people paint their feelings, and I started painting and went from there. I taught myself that each brush means something.
#ARIES YOUNG SOULS HOW TO#
And when I got out I taught myself how to paint. I liked to draw when I was young, but I stopped doing that, and when I was in prison in the sixties I started drawing again. I get a lot of ideas from that part of the world. I like the Muslim art and stuff from that part of the world, like India. They got a religion ain't too much different. Sometimes I like to paint where they're taking Christ off the cross. I admire Rembrandt, and he painted a lot of pictures of Christ. I don't listen to the Man, I look up to heaven. God sends angels to try to clear up some of this trouble on Earth. Some of the white peoples I put in my art are somebody like John Brown. I sometimes have my mind set on John Brown. A lot of Quakers, jeopardizing their life, lost their life trying to help black people against slavery. I got good white peoples in my paintings. They're not necessarily just black peoples. They done good things, they helped the struggle, you know. When I started with the figure painting, I liked to show good peoples, the heroes, like that. I think, like, I'm one of the figures in my art. I make like I'm a warrior, like God sending an angel to stop war. I figured the world might get better, it might not, but it was just something I had to be doing. My feeling was the world might be better if I put up my protests. That's when I started the figure painting, people walking along, knocking each other down, like that. That's when all the demonstrations were going on, protests, protesters sitting in, marching. The war was going on then, war in Vietnam. I knowed when I was making the art that one day it was going to go. They was fixing to tear them down and build an expressway. I put my paintings on a lot of fronts of abandoned buildings. I started out about 1971 in Goodbread Alley. The first things I painted were heads with halos around them. I was just looking through art books, looking at guys painting their feelings. That's the onliest thing I could mostly do. Then I found out how these guys paint their feelings up North, paint on walls. I been drawing all my life, but I taught myself to paint in the early seventies.
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