Three Ways to Start

Around 1939, in his eighties, Bill Traylor began drawing on discarded cardboard on Monroe Street in Montgomery, Alabama. Born into slavery around 1853, he produced more than a thousand works in only a few years. The Smithsonian describes him as the only known artist born enslaved to leave a substantial body of drawn and painted work.^[1][2]

The drawings can look spontaneous because the materials are spare. Their real force is compositional: compressed silhouettes, repeated animals, tilted architecture, and scenes whose apparent simplicity can carry histories of labour and Jim Crow violence. “Outsider” explains where the white art establishment placed Traylor, not where Traylor stood in relation to his own culture.

Jean-Michel Basquiat began in public language, writing SAMO aphorisms across Lower Manhattan. By 1983 he named his subject matter with three nouns: “royalty, heroism, and the streets.”^[3] Crowns, anatomical fragments, lists, and crossed-out words became a system for placing Black musicians, athletes, history, and commerce inside one agitated field.

Crossing a word out did not erase it. It made the reader work harder to see it. That inversion is the grammar: hierarchy arrives through obstruction, repetition, and ownership of the mark.

Alexander Calder trained as a mechanical engineer, then built a miniature circus of wire, cloth, cork, and found objects that travelled in five suitcases.^[4] A 1930 visit to Mondrian's studio helped turn him toward abstraction. Marcel Duchamp named the moving works mobiles; Jean Arp answered with stabile for the ones that stayed put.^[5]

A mobile is never one composition. Mass, distance, pivot, gravity, and moving air keep negotiating the answer. The maker establishes the conditions, then chance receives a share of authorship.

Traylor used the geometry available on cardboard. Basquiat made language argue with its own erasure. Calder gave balance a nervous system. The common ground is not happiness, spontaneity, or outsider status. It is a way of seeing that can keep producing new decisions.