Art from Her Heart: Folk Artist Clementine Hunter (review)

Louisiana artist Clementine Hunter worked as manual laborer on a plantation, using the evenings to make art from leftover paints and found materials. This picture-book biography briefly describes her art and its representation of her plantation life, including both bad times and good times. The prose is measured and simple, but the text is sketchy on both her artistic work and her biography, and some of the phrasing is unclear (does “she didn’t wait to travel and seek inspiration in foreign lands” mean that later on she did travel?); ultimately, there’s little indication here of why kids should care about either Hunter’s life or art. Reproductions of Hunter’s work are limited to a tiny closing gallery with images almost literally thumbnail-sized, but Evans’ double-page spreads are arresting mixed-media images; painted brushstrokes give a silky texture to skin and objects, pencil lines have a folklike crudeness in textures yet outline borders with a crispness that gives the figures collage-like distinctness. This would be most effective coupled with a more concrete look at Hunter’s work, so that audiences could get a clear picture of the art as well as a view of the artist. A brief bibliography is appended, and an author’s note gives more detail about Hunter’s life.