When we were driving through Andalusia on the way to Florida for our vacation, I was so tickled to see these Woodie Long murals in downtown:
He loved to paint children with kites:
Woodie lived here in Andalusia and also in Florida; he started out as a house painter but one day when he was 45, he picked up his wife’s watercolors (she was taking an art class) and when she came home to see what he had created, she told him: you are an artist.
He was the son of a sharecropper — one of twelve children — and he often missed school to help the family. Many of his pieces are memory paintings:
Woodie was loved. He passed away in 2009 but has had two retrospective exhibits that I know of already (one in Andalusia, another in Seaside). Marcia Weber got started with her amazing gallery in Montgomery showing Woodie’s work, and she has a large collection.
Inside the Andalusia gallery: