Artist
Tom Feelings

Description
Portrait of a boy. A unique original piece done in charcoal. An incredible example of presence and attitude. His posture and expression are captured so genuinely by T. Feelings.

Biography
Thomas Feelings was born in 1933, in the ultra-urban, Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York. He began to draw at age four, copying pictures from newspaper comic strips into a book of blank pages sewn together by his mother. He was just a little older when he heard about Thipadeaux, a black artist who was teaching at the Police Athletic Academy in his neighborhood. Feelings showed some of his drawings to Thipadeaux. The teacher suggested that, rather than copying from other people's work, he try to draw some of the real people in his neighborhood. Feelings began at home with oil paintings of his mother and his aunt and went on to draw the adults and the wary, diffident children he saw around him.

If any man should be regarded as the personification of the "black is beautiful" philosophy, that man is Tom Feelings. Feelings spent a lifetime as a painter, sculptor, and book illustrator underscoring this message. From the dawn of the U.S. civil rights era, when he came of age as an artist, Feelings was passionately committed to the mission of encouraging black children to understand their own spiritual and physical beauty. Feelings remained faithful to that mission for more than 40 years.

He acknowledges that the sorrow arising from slavery and racism–as it resonates against the joy of surviving such ordeals–expresses the uniqueness of being black in the United States. He summed up this belief in the foreword to his picture book about slavery, The Middle Passage: "As the blues, jazz, and the spirituals teach, one must embrace all of life, both its pain and joy, creatively. Knowing this, I, we, may be disappointed, but never destroyed."

Written by Gillian Wolf and Sara Pendergast

Condition
Vintage, ca. 1960’s Excellent.

Measurements
W 34.5 x H 27 CM

Frame
W 53 x H 43 CM