SHE PAINTED FROM MEMORY

 

CLEMENTINE HUNTER was another black Catholic painter  whose scenes  were of Catholic ceremonies,  often including biblical characters represented as black. A large theme of her work was of a black Jesus on the cross.

She was born in 1887-or 88 into a  Creole family at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana and was baptized  on March 19, 1887. When she was around five years old  she was sent to St. John the Baptist Catholic Church School, which was segregated.  The rules were so harsh  Clementine left school at a young age. She never formally learned to read or write and began working in the fields at eight years old, picking cotton alongside her father. (Our Mother Ruth began at age 4 in Georgia) Throughout her life she moved around in the Cane River Valley while her father looked for work. 

When Clementine  was about twenty in 1907, she give birth to her first child, Joseph Dupree, called Frenchie, by Charles Dupree, a Creole man about fifteen years  her senior. Charles is rumored to have built a steam engine with having only seen a picture and was well known for his highly skilled labor.Their second child, Cora, was born a few years later. Charles and Clementine never married, and he died in 1914.

In 1924, Clementine married Emmanuel Hunter, a Creole woodchopper at Melrose Plantation. Until Clementine married Emmanuel, she spoke only Creole French, but he taught her American English. The two lived together in a workers' cabin at Melrose and had five children, although two were stillborn.  On the morning before giving birth to one of her children, she harvested 78 pounds of cotton, went home and called for the midwife. She was back working a few days later.

In the late 1920s, Clementine began working as cook and housekeeper for Cammie Henry, the wife of John H. Henry. She was known for her talent adapting traditional Creole recipes, sewing intricate clothes and dolls, and tending to the house's vegetable garden. Before long, Melrose evolved into a salon for artists and writers in this period, hosted by Cammie Henry. In the late 1930s, Clementine Hunter began to formally paint, using discarded tubes from the visiting artists at Melrose.

In the early 1940s, Emmanuel became terminally ill and bedridden. Clementine was now the sole financial provider for the family, working full time, while caring for Emmanuel, and painting late at night. Emmanuel died in 1944, leaving  her to work and care for her children.

She sold her first paintings for as little as 25 cents. But by the end of her life, her work was being exhibited in museums and sold by dealers for thousands of dollars. Clementine produced an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 paintings in her lifetime. She was granted an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree by Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1986, and she is the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the present-day New Orleans Museum of Art. In 2013, director Robert Wilson presented a new opera about her, entitled Zinnias: the Life of Clementine Hunter, at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

 In 1949, a show of Clementine’s paintings at the New Orleans Arts and Crafts Show garnered attention outside of the Cane River Valley. An article was published about her in "Look" in June 1953, giving her national exposure.

Her paintings changed throughout her lifetime. Her early work, such as "Cane River Baptism" from 1950, features more earth tones and muted colors.[ Before the patronage and support from François Mignon and others, Hunter used paint left by visiting artists at Melrose Plantation, therefore she was working within other artists' palettes. Additionally, Clementine would frequently thin out her supply of paint with turpentine, creating more of a watercolor effect, which caused many Hunter scholars to believe she had a watercolor experimental phase. Beginning in the 1950s, her painting style was altered by arthritis in her hands.

From this period on, she leaned more towards abstract and impressionist work, with less fine detail, because it was difficult for her to paint. In 1962, her friend James Pipes Register encouraged her to become even more abstract, painting works like Clementine Makes a Quilt. However, by 1964, she returned to more narrative works. In the 1980s, as she approached one hundred years old, she began painting on smaller, more handheld objects like jugs. She died in 1988 at the age of 101. Obviously that hard work as a child did not effect her negatively.

Clementine has become one of the most well-known self-taught artists. She is described as a memory painter because she documented Black Southern life in the Cane River Valley in the early 20th century. Her most famous work depicts brightly colored depictions of important events like funerals, baptisms, and weddings and scenes of plantation labor like picking cotton or pecans, and domestic labor. However, her paintings vary in subject and style, including many abstract paintings and still life paintings of zinnias.

She painted from memory, stating: "I just get it in my mind and I just go ahead and paint but I can’t look at nothing and paint. No trees, no nothing. I just make my own tree in my mind, that’s the way I paint."