Helen La France

In her biography, Helen La France (1919-2020) recalls buying her first paint set as a woman in her early forties, an act which culminated in a full-time pursuit by the time she was sixty-seven.1 Born in 1919 to a farming family in southwestern Kentucky, La France’s early life was marked by an emphasis on family, work ethic, study, and worship. Barred from attending public school due to Jim Crow laws, she was home-schooled by parents who conscientiously acquired the same textbooks as the ones used by local white students.  While both parents nurtured their daughter’s artistic talents, a career in the arts was out of the question given the family’s economic circumstances. La France spent much of her adult life working—as a phone receptionist, in tobacco barns, in restaurants, and as a decorative painter in a ceramic factory. Like many artists outside of the mainstream art world who achieve success in their later life, her enthusiastic pursuit of painting was an answer to decades of longing to create work. Initially, the artist used an abandoned school bus as her studio—the school bus, with its promise of uplift and education is a repeated motif in her paintings. In the 1990s, art dealer Bruce Shelton, who became an early advocate of her paintings, helped to arrange for a studio to be built for La France on land that she owned.2 She continued to produce artworks in that space until her nineties, when she moved to a nursing home where she kept painting until her death at 101 in 2020.

A lifetime’s worth of viscerally charged memories of life in rural Kentucky became the fodder for the hundreds of paintings La France executed beginning in the late 1980s.  The majority of La France’s output focused on the daily life of people in her community, and the artist would often revisit themes, producing multiple works on the same subject. Sites where people gathered and where communities were built and strengthened are particularly well represented in her ouvre, which is encyclopedic in its coverage of the places where she spent her life. Her paintings include images of general stores, barbeque and fruit stands, children leaving for school and at recess, farms, restaurants, parades, and carnivals, in addition to tender interior genre scenes and countless depictions of church life. La France also produced portraits of late-20th-century figures including Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and, towards the end of her life, a series of phantasmagorical Bible scenes. Her output additionally encapsulated carved and articulated wooden dolls and quilts—the community-based production of the latter became a frequent theme of her paintings. La France’s work is often compared to that of Anna Robinson (Grandma) Moses, with whom she shares stylistic traits including the use of small vignettes of figures set in vast panoramic landscapes. Nevertheless, La France’s paintings exhibit a greater degree of experimentation and an appetite for diverse source material, as evidenced by her dynamic compositions and wide range of settings.

La France tended to revisit certain motifs again and again, altering details that would become key to the meaning of the work. “I am not trying to tell a story. I just like to do things that I remember seeing. It’s a way of re-living it again,” she notes in her biography.3 The recurrence of particular images speaks to the power of these memories for the artist. Church Picnic, for instance, is one of many depictions of similar scenes of a social gathering outside of a small, rural church that is overshadowed by large oak trees. The inclusion of a white church, as opposed to the brick building used in other picnic scenes, alludes to the church La France attended as a child that burned down in the 1960s.4 In this work, as in similar pieces, an older woman walks down from the church entrance into a bustling circular driveway where numerous cars—as well as a school bus and two buggies—are parked. Two men approach each other in greeting with arms outstretched toward a handshake. At the lower right, little girls have formed a circle and are dancing, as elderly parishioners with hunched shoulders slowly make their way toward the group of women busily setting up a table for food. The dead sleep peacefully in the distant cemetery. The entire congregation is dressed in bright pastels—pinks, yellows, and blues that match the clear sky above—which suggests a gathering in spring, perhaps Easter or Memorial Day. La France’s keen sense of detail extends beyond her emphasis on the figures—with virtuosic flair, she captures the golden light of early evening sun ablaze on the upper limbs of the trees. The juxtaposition of young and old, their close proximity to the resting place of their ancestors, and the joyous late-spring setting speaks not only to the groundedness of the communities that La France memorializes in this and other works, but also the critical role of the institutions that were central to the life of those communities.

Anastasia Kinigopoulo