Woodie Long was a housepainter
before he was a folk artist. I remember him painting
cottonpickers and kiteflyers, but not men painting houses.
Bicycles, school buses, New York taxicabs, bluegrass musicians.
Walter Anderson painted blue crabs. Birds and reptiles. He rowed out
to Horn Island on sketching trips. He took his watercolors.
Justin Gaffrey builds a thick impasto with acrylics.
He uses a palette knife. Hemingway would study
Cézanne's composition in museums.
His method. All literature
is world literature, Goethe said.