Wooden Hut #98, Jimmie Lee Sudduth Painting

A quaint wooden house, the logs that compose it shaded in brown and green. Jimmie Lee Sudduth was one of the early masters of southern self-taught art. He was born March 10, 1910 in Caines Ridge, Alabama, near Fayette, where he lived for most of his life. There he worked for years as a farm hand, although even from an early age Sudduth had an affinity for art. "I started drawin' when I was three years old, and I been drawin' ever since," he said. "I always use mud. That's right. And charcoal out of the fireplace. My mama was a medicine doctor, you know. She'd go out and get stuff outdoors, and I'd be drawing on a tree with the charcoal and mud." True to his word, Sudduth painted with whatever materials he happened to have on hand. He would use grasses, berries, and even soot for color. His favorite and most used pigment was mud, which he experimented mixing with sugar, soft drinks, and instant coffee to make it adhere better to the plywood, doors, and other found wood he painted on.