Dot Long runs the
Woodie Long Gallery of Folk Art in
She is open from 1 to 4 on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
The gallery is full of big Woodie Long paintings and smaller prints, postcards, and T-shirts with Woodie’s art on them. It’s like an artist having his own room in a retrospective of his work at a museum. Well worth a visit.
Woodie and Dot
painted houses together for seven years, in
“Woodie was not afraid of paint,” She said. “`It’s only paint,’” he would say. “`You can paint over it.’”
Nor was paint on the floor of his studio a problem. Or on his clothes. Painters got paint on them.
It washes off.
Woodie was very grounded, Dot says.
They met in
Are you a painter? No, I’m a writer. I meant a housepainter. I meant a technical writer.
I worked industrial construction with painters. It’s hard, physical work. Nasty, dirty work.
The painters were usually drinkers.
Woodie wasn’t a drinker. He was a gardener.
Woodie’s paintings tell stories about his youth. Growing up the son of a sharecropper. Knew black people as a boy. Worked with them in the fields.
Some of his best friends were folk artists. Folk artists like Jimmie Lee Sudduth, Mose Tolliver, Bernice Sims.
We have a Woodie of black and white cottonpickers surrounded by black and white angels.
I just love it.
He gave it to us one Christmas at Pretty Michelle’s. He brought beet tops out of his garden.
I realized I wanted to live where I could grow beets in a garden, make borscht out of a rooster, when I killed him, eat mullet caught in a castnet in a local bayou, and go to hear acoustic string band music on the weekends.
Maybe see Woodie and Dot there.
Dot’s taking
dancing classes with Michelle in
She isn’t bulking up but it helps keep her muscles toned.
And she meets people.
Losing a soul-mate isn’t easy. You’re lucky to have friends.
