Every day, with each step down the stairs to his basement, Jim Weaver feels himself getting younger, the images in his mind more lucid. As he heads toward the room where he paints, the 76-year-old folk artist becomes “Jimmy” again, a young boy looking at the world in wide-eyed wonder in the 1940s and ’50s in Sheffield, Ala.
Some of the things he sees are the carefree moments of childhood – kids fishing, chasing lightning bugs, hula-hooping, watching planes in the sky. Others are indicative of racial tension in his hometown – Black children not allowed in the same swimming pool as white children, for example. He knew segregation was wrong even then, and he wondered why all children weren’t treated equally.
In his basement, which he fondly calls his “time machine,” Jim, a memory painter, brings to life colorful scenes from his childhood. He considers himself a storyteller. Each of his brightly colored paintings has a story attached – like the one he considers his masterpiece, “Balcony of a 1950s 3D Movie.” Born in 1943, Jim remembers going to the movies with his father and sitting in the balcony, where his dad could smoke. Black people had to sit in an area of the balcony that was partitioned, with enough of an opening at the top for white people to throw their trash over it.
“I can still see that ice going through the projection,” he says.
Not knowing what else to say, his father told him, “Son, there’s a lot of mean people in the world.” The experience stuck with Jim, who has painted it over and over, along with other memories from his childhood.
“It’s uncanny what I remember,” he says.
He paints many of the same scenes again and again in different sizes, varying the colors and other details. Following the advice of a fellow folk artist, Jim uses samples of vivid Behr house paint to paint on wood or canvas. He also prefers to use a small spotter paintbrush. It took him some 130 hours to paint the 24-by-36-inch version of the movie theater memory from 1952 with that tiny brush.
“I call myself deliberate, but I think I’m slow,” he says with a laugh. During a phone interview, his chair squeaks as it swivels around when he’s describing his workspace. His wife, Gwen, teases him about cleaning it up, but he insists he knows where everything is. He doesn’t want to jeopardize his perfectly working time machine.
At Jim’s feet at all times are at least two of the four dogs who keep him company while he works. Years ago, he rescued an abandoned, pregnant mama dog in the neighborhood. Now and then, he’ll get up to let her and her three pups in and out of the back yard, or just stop to pet them when they need attention.
A painting of his childhood dog, Cracker – the first thing he drew when he decided to try his hand at art at age 60, and still a favorite subject today – hangs on the wall nearby. Cracker, who lived from 1950 to 1967, hated the postman and is included in many of Jim’s paintings. Every year, Jim sends hand-painted Christmas cards to everyone who has bought his artwork during the year. Cracker is always featured on the much-anticipated cards.
As memories pop up when he’s working on a painting, he’ll write them down on his table. He remembers “everything” from 70-plus years ago, he says. “I can remember what my mama said when I was three and four years old, but not what my wife said yesterday,” he says. It’s a joke he repeats often, but there’s more than a hint of truth in it.
‘I was meant to do this’
Raised in the northeast Alabama town of Sheffield, Jim returned there when he got out of the U.S. Army in 1965, then he left for four decades or so for a career in retail. For 17 years before he retired, he was the manager of the Walmart in Andalusia. When Gwen retired from teaching after 35 years, he convinced her to move north to Florence.
The couple has collected folk art for years. Gwen, who grew up on a farm, also feels an affinity for the style. “We both just gravitated toward it,” he says.
The walls of their home are filled with work by Bernice Sims, Woody Long, Jimmie Lee Sudduth, Mose Tolliver, Purvis Young, Mister Imagination, Maurice Cook and others. “I can’t afford my collection,” Jim says with a laugh. “We’re wall to wall, bumper to bumper.”
After he retired, Jim decided he was just going to try to paint. “I’d never painted anything,” he says. “Never drew anything.”
An artist friend who owned a shop en route to the beach asked him if she could display some of his work. After talking him into it, she displayed six of his paintings behind the cash register. Less than a week later, a couple from Boston came in and bought them all.
Encouraged, Jim kept working at it. For six years, he applied to the Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, but never made it – then, finally, he was accepted. This fall would have been his seventh show there, and his daughter Jaime Weaver’s first (she makes unique wall hangings from reclaimed materials), but the festival was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m disappointed, but I’m glad they made that decision,” he says. “I love Kentuck. I love everything about it.”
Once a collector of others’ art, now Jim finds his own work is in demand. His paintings are sold in the Kentuck Gallery as well as at the Visionary Folk Art Gallery in Dayton, Ohio, and online through Possum County Art and Collectibles. Lately, he’s had good luck selling artwork from his Facebook page.
Each painting includes a laminated written version of the story behind it – like “And the Children Shall Lead Them,” based on a memory from 1949 in which he watched two little girls drink from two different water fountains. The Black girl sipped from the water fountain marked “White,” and the white girl used the “Black” fountain, then they looked at each other, smiled and walked off.
A few years ago, a patron bought two versions of the painting, one for himself and another that he donated to a school in Birmingham. To this day, as far as Jim knows, students there are required in their English classes to write essays based on the painting.
Just thinking of it gives him goosebumps. “It’s just overwhelming to me,” he says. “I guess I was meant to do this.”
Another painting, “Annie Hood and Jimmy W. in 1946,” features a Black woman who was a friend of his parents, holding him in her arms. “She used to love on me,” he says. “When I got older, I would hide from her. Later, I found out she’d had a little boy who drowned, and he and I had the same birthday. If I’d known, I’d have let her kiss me all she wanted.”
Revisiting memories, whether sweet or bittersweet, through painting them and sharing the stories is cathartic for Jim, who has suffered with migraine headaches for years. “This has been the happiest quarter of my life,” he says. “Even when I had more money, I wasn’t as happy as I am now.”
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Alabama artist Jim Weaver started painting at age 60 - AL.com
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