|
The Outsider Art of Thornton Dial ( Part 1 ) - The
Beginning.
Thornton Dial was born on 1928 in Emmel, Alabama as a child of a black
teenage mother and an unknown father. When he was ten years old, his mother
sent him to her sister who died three years later. After this his grandmother
on the mother's side, who lived in Bessemer, Alabama, took care of her
grandson. Thornton Dial left school after the 4th Grade of Elementary school
because he had to support his poor family. That's why he is an illiterate to
this day.
When he's twenty-three he marries Clara Mae Murrow who bore him three sons
and two daughters. Until today, Dial lives and works in his hometown Bessemer,
a medium-sized town with a lot of industry.
Thornton Dial's youth is stereotypical to that of most of the likes of him.
As an unskilled labourer he had to take every job that was offered to him, in
order to provide his family. So he worked in succession as a carpenter,
blacksmith, house-painter, plumber, builder, sometimes at the Pullman Standard
Company in Bessemer working on freight cars and as a welder at Bessemer Water
Works for thirteen years.
Due to an innate restlessness, Thornton Dial was never satisfied with his
work, which resulted in various other activities like growing plants, fishing,
and keeping pigs, cows and turkeys. Besides all the necessary activities, he
found time to express himself creatively by bringing together all kinds of
available material. As a young boy he already put together small pieces of
toys he gathered. Because his family lived in poverty he had to find other
ways to amuse himself.
The materials Thornton Dial works with, today and already as a young boy,
consists of disposable products like plastic, industrial waste products, lost
property, in short everything that is available for free. At the Pullman
Standard Company he learned to work with iron and steel and how to fuse and
remodelling it. A skill he could apply to his assemblies and sculptures.
|
|
>
Sr ( b.1928 )
Title: Everybody Got a Right to the Tree of Life, 1988
mixed media (tin, glass marbles, enamel, wood)
Size: 48" x 96 1/2"
From the collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art
Picture by G. Wood |
Until 1987, the year he met William Arnett, there was no one in his
surroundings that attached great value to Thornton Dial's artistic creations.
Also Dial didn't feel the need to display his work to the rest of the world.
He was afraid that the whites would wrongfully interpret his work because of
the social commentary and perceive it as repelling or menacing.
For Dial, creating this artistic objects was nothing more than a way to
express himself and representing his ideas. He, himself didn't see it as art,
he was not familiair with the concept of art. Before he met William Arnett, an
understanding of art was strange to him. Many objects he created were
destroyed or recycled because of lack of space. His kids often joke about the
fact that the small piece of land they lived on was heightened because of
their father's strange affairs.
As an illiterate black man, Thornton Dial felt insecure and he had to be
cautious of deceptions. He accepted his submissive association with the white
people as an indisputable matter of course. His creative ability enabled him
to supress his feelings and impotence, but also to transpose the meaning of
being black and that of his own culture into images. His knowledge of language
was not suffient enough, that's why he created his own mysterious visual
language.
In part 2, of this three part article sequence we'll focus on Thornton
Dial's relation with the art world and his discoverer William Arnett !
Here you can find part 1 of this three part
article sequence: >
Thornton
Dial - The Beginning.
Here
you can find part 2 of this three part article sequence: >
William
Arnett and Dial's Work Environment.
Here you can find part 3 of this three part
article sequence: >
The
Outsider Art of Thornton Dial ( Part 3 ) - His Outsider Folk Art.
|
