That Friday feeling, encapsulated by the American artist Bill Traylor, a self-taught purveyor of beautifully emotive drawings and paintings. Traylor, who was born into slavery in 1850s Alabama, spent most of his life after emancipation as a sharecropper, only taking up art in his eighties, as a means of documenting his memories and observations. He befriended a fellow artist, Charles Shannon, who bought most of the pieces Traylor completed before his death in 1949. Tragically, Traylor never found success in his lifetime, but his work stole the show at Corcoran Gallery’s 1982 exhibition Black Folk Art in America, and he has since been duly recognised as the singular pioneer of modern art that he was.
