He was born into slavery in Alabama. There’s uncertainty around the date, but 1853 is the date the experts feel is most accurate. He says his mother told him he was born on the 1st of April. Again, the experts here felt that it was most likely April, somewhere at the start of spring, but it probably wasn’t the 1st. His surname was Traylor, the name of the cotton plantation owner on who’s land he was born. His first name was Bill. Not William.
Bill had five siblings, Liza, Henry, Frank, Jim, and Emet. Bill married three times. And he claimed he’d fathered and raised around 20 children. Historians believe it was more like 15 children, two of which he’d fathered while married to one of his wives.
Some people say he murdered a man who he suspected of sleeping with one of his wives. Another story has it that one of his sons was lynched by the Birmingham police in 1929.
What I do know is that Bill started drawing and painting when he was in his mid-80’s and that his paintings are some of the most brutal pieces of art I have seen.
People who find their ‘thing’ later in life
I’m getting older, so old now that I’m at the tail-end of my midlife crisis, which I experienced less as a crisis and more as a rediscovery. And as I arrive at this stage of my life, I feel an overwhelming sense of confidence and possibility in what I’m capable of. I haven’t felt this before. And I have a notion that I’m arriving at the point where I might have something worthwhile to contribute, and that my contribution might mean something to someone.
And as I wake up to this sense of possibility, I’ve grown curious about others who made their marks, in whatever field, later in life. Because, as I’ve experienced, as a person dives into their 40’s they give less of a shit about impressing others. It is also then that they start accumulating some real life experience, and enough wisdom to guide them to the next phase of their life.
East Asian Artists’ art names
In East Asia there is a tradition where artists adopted an ‘art name’ (like a pen name or a pseudonym) to mark a change in their life as artists. In many cases it was when an artist had been recognised as having found their style, or their voice.
This appeals to me. In the West, our parents name us, and these names remain static, changing only when we try to escape our past or sometimes when we marry. This lack of flexibility when it comes to names implies that we will only ever be one thing. And that our identities are fixed, and that the changes we undergo through our lives don’t mean all the much.
Bill Traylor is one of those people who teaches us that we can transcend our names and our lives. That we can find and do work that matters to us. He teaches us that if we live, search and practice for long enough, we will eventually evolve and discover who we were meant to be; that we’ll find that one thing that brings our life purpose. And when you find that one thing your life will divide in two. All the moments leading up to you discovering what you were meant to do and everything following that discovery. Mark Twain said it best, despite this being another one of those quotes that seems to be misattributed:
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Maybe not Mark Twain
It’s after you’ve lived through that other most important day, that you should consider taking an art name.
Back to Bill Traylor
Bill Traylor was a slave for 12 years. After his emancipation he continued to work on the plantation as a farmhand and a sharecropper. Traylor never learned to read or write, and nobody taught him how to paint. At the age of 75 he moved to Montgomery, the capital city of Alabama. After his rheumatism became too severe, he left a job in a shoe factory. He was effectively homeless and slept in a backroom of a funeral home. In 1939 he started spending his days on Monroe Street, a hub in the Black neighbourhood of the city. It was around this time that Traylor started drawing and painting on scraps of paper and cardboard using crayons and pencils and whatever else he could find.
He drew animals, people, houses, and trees. He used shapes such as rectangles, triangles, and circles to create images. His paintings are flat with no perspective or depth. A writer for the New Yorker described Bill Traylor’s work as part prehistoric painting and part spanking new. I would add that there’s a nightmarish subtext to the animals and scenes he portrayed. Many of his works have a brutal and menacing undercurrent that make them difficult to look away from.
Bill Traylor, between 1939 and 1949 painted and drew over 1200 pieces. Here’s a man who at birth was named after the plantation owner who owned him. At the age of 85 he started painting parts of his life which are profound and important pieces of art.
Maybe Bill, in his 80’s, experienced the other most important day of his life, as Mark Twain describes it. I like to think that he discovered his love for drawing and painting by accident, and that as soon as he did he couldn’t stop himself from making art. And I wonder if he the considered changing his name, or if his name had become part of his art. But the one thing I take from Bill Traylor is that it’s never too late to find your voice. That there is always time to make the art that only you can make. And your life is never too fucked up to make your contribution.