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Mattie Lou O'Kelley |
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Decatur folk artist shies away from spotlight Mattie Lou O'Kelley always thought of herself as a stay-at-home "piddler." That is, until 20 years ago when the 81-year-old folk artist began documenting rural Georgia life as it was in the early 1900s. No more a piddler, but a painter of national renown, Miss O'Kelley is now booked up a year ahead in commissioned paintings. A self-taught illustrator and a writer of children's books, her latest volume, off the presses three weeks ago, is an autobiographical nostalgia trip, "Mattie Lou O'Kelley, Folk Artist." Painting in oil almost daily from memory or real life, Miss O'Kelley's lifestyle is reclusive. She ventures out to the post office, to a downtown deli, takes an occasional trip downtown, or visits a downtown bookstore to autograph copies of her book. Her vivid vignettes of agrarian northeast Georgia - "Hog Killing," and "Sister Gertrude's Old Gobbler," among others - have been shown in New York City galleries. Atlanta's High Museum of Art has several of her oils in its permanent collection, but only one other gallery in the city has displayed her work. "I've been in Life magazine and People. It's been a good while," she said. "I started painting in Maysville just as a hobby," Miss O'Kelley said. "I liked what I was doing and people liked it. I paint whatever suits me, from memory or I just make it up." One of the people who liked her work was Robert Bishop, director of the American Museum of Folk Art in New York, to which she has donated one of her oils. He discovered the woman who paints "straight from my soul" in 1975 when he saw several of her paintings in the High Museum's gift shop. Mr. Bishop arranged to meet Miss O'Kelley and became her friend. He has promoted her work in his own writing since that time. He wrote the introduction to her newest book published by Little, Brown & Co., which contains pithy commentary accompanying reproductions of her works. Miss O'Kelley procured an art dealer in New York, where she lived for six months, who would exhibit and market her work. "I made a good living there," she said. From New York, she moved to West Palm Beach, Fla., where she continued to paint daily. Her first illustrations were for a children's book, "Winter Place," followed by illustrating and writing two other books, "Hills of Georgia” and "Circus." Seven years ago, she moved to Decatur "because it was like the country, yet it has the convenience of the city." She tried 10 "public jobs," she said, but she didn't stick with them. "I've just lived from pillar to post," she said. "I never finished high school. I've had jobs keeping house, working in a lunch room, in a sewing plant or factory and others, but I've always been a homebody." The shy, unassuming women's fertile imagination and penchant for detail will yield more books, she said. "I always have something I want to do. I never get lonesome," she said. A book of city scenes is forthcoming and she may rewrite one of several unpublished novels, she said. Growing up in Banks and Jackson counties, she said a regular dinner time respite from working in the fields came when her mother read the comics on the front porch as the buggy-driven mailman passed by, a scene recreated in one of her works. "I was raised on Katzenjammer Kids, Winnie Winkle and Mutt and Jeff." In "Sister Gertrude's Old Gobbler," another favorite illustration, she commented in the book: "Gertrude's always been the puny one. Papa never let Gert work in the fields. Here comes that tom strutting. He didn't miss a chance to torment me." Remembering his taunts, she recalled, "He'd get under the back porch and when he saw me come out, he'd run rings around me. `Gobble, gobble,' " she imitated the scary bird. At age 15, her mother gave her a "settin' hen" on a nest of eggs and told her she could have the money from sale of fryers produced. "From them, I got enough money to buy a Kodak box camera," she said. "I wish I had it now." Her first photograph, her family home in Maysville blanketed in snow, also appears in her recent book, available at Final Touch Gallery and Books in Decatur. Her living room walls are lined with folk art, mystery books, literary classics, stacks of hats she wears for protection from the sun, and a contemporary sculpture, the governor's award in the arts she received in 1976. "You figure out what that is, I don't know," she said. [photo: Mattie Lou O'Kelley sits at the table where she does many of her paintings. She is looking through her recently published book, `Mattie Lou O'Kelley, Folk Artist.'] Page last updated 11/21/2011 |
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