Several years ago I did a rough edged painting on Money Road with the Bryant Grocery in the shadows concealed by overgrowth. Last month I went back up there on a day of severe stormy weather and heard once more from Wheeler Parker about his cousin Emmett Till’s encounter with Carolyn Bryant 66 years ago today on August 24, 1955, and his brutal murder at the hands of her husband and his men.
When I got back home I couldn’t stop thinking about how my own painting pushed the focal point off to the side and centered on that damned gas station. So I promised myself to do a big piece that put the Bryant Grocery in the forefront. And, since now it looks more like a topiary than a building, I went looking for some sense of how that location looked in 1955. Eventually I pieced enough details together to create this painting. It’s one of the biggest canvases I have painted recently, 4 feet by 5 feet.
Once more I started with a tonal study, this time using a graphite pencil to shade in the blocks of different tone and draw in the shapes and negative spaces. Then I used a brush dipped in water to smear the graphite onto the canvas and this created a nice blurry old postcard effect with soft edges that I liked a lot.
I followed that with thinned down gray scale paints to fix the patterns. Next I used a limited red and green palette to create the color accents and did a very washed out, scuffed up sky, a little like the one in the five dancers.
Then I went back and covered up the significant amount of unpainted white canvas, or most of it anyway with white paint. At this point, I now am going over it in oils and straightening out the crooked parts and punching up the colors. I will be donating this to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, MS, and a print will go to the Emmett Till Civic Center in Summit, IL. Here it is in its near final state. Still tweaking here and there.
Bryant Grocery Money MS