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My paintings can be described as "witnessing". The work is often based on images and stories in the news, people who look out at us every day from the printed page and television screen but who are usually nameless -- refugees, rebels, farmers, men and women who tend and defend their land, homes, children, animals and ideas. My intention is that they speak out from the paintings: "HERE WE ARE."I lived in Latin America for 18 years and came to know the languages and the people in out of the way places. I traveled to Indian settlements and ancient ruins, Baroque villages and areas where Afro culture and rituals still flourish, principally in Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico, and also in Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia and Guatemala. I accompanied rustic pilgrimages into back lands where people rode for days in the back of trucks, on horse and mule back and in ox carts in Biblical fashion to make offerings, sell their wares and cattle, buy salt and other supplies, marry and baptize their children in group ceremonies.
These experiences still have a strong impact on my paintings and connect with my own raw upbringing in Missouri which varied from the pop culture of Kansas City streets, reflecting jazz, corrupt politics and racial inequality, and where my earliest and visual artistic influences were in the dime stores; to the Missouri farmland where my mother's people raised grapes and apples and where my sister and I fashioned our toys and dolls from mud and sticks, hollyhocks, corn cobs and corn silk, concocting our paints from mulberries, beets, boiled onions, grasses and laundry bluing, and where gypsies parked their wagons along the oiled road in front of our small house. This early background still gives intensity and vision to my artistic endeavors and affects my approach to materials and techniques.
My work is political. I realize I was instinctively political as a child -- acutely aware of the poverty and prejudice of those depression years, of the dust wrecked farm land, the losses and foreclosures, the stunted lives and lack of education, the Black ghettos and segregation.
I also work in theater as designer and performer often with dancers, poets, actors and musicians. I am now collaborating on a small theater piece on the life and prophecies of Nostradamus and one based on the life of my mother.
Painting is about bravery. Art is emergency. Accept the unexpected and the surprise of the accidental and choose discovery over perfection every time. Rely on your hand to know what it is doing. Respect your own process. It will be different from everyone else's. This is my advice to myself.
Henrietta Mantooth
526 West 26th Street
Studio 9AA
New York, NY 10001
tel: 212-874-4572email: ...... MantoothH@earthlink.dot net
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