The double vision of Clarence Major, painter and writer - Clarence Major Issue

African American Review, Spring, 1994 by Lisa C. Roney

If double consciousness is a factor in the fiction of African Americans, then it makes sense that it would be all the more so in their practice of the visual arts. While the writing of African Americans is "difficult, working in English, a language with a white |personality'" (Major, Dark and Feeling 26), at least African traditions of storytelling survived in the slave colonies and evolved into the strong, rich African-American modes of vernacular speech, tales, and lyrics. Unfortunately, this was not time to the same extent for African traditions of visual expression. Although some examples of African-influenced carvings, pottery, basketry, and ironwork are extant from the period, "the surviving visual art tradition was |generic, simple, and (almost completely) restricted to areas of dense and recent contact with tropical Africa'" (Robert Farris Thompson, qtd. in Fine 17).

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s provided a modem alternative for those seeking a uniquely African-American perspective in all the arts, but was primarily a literary and musical phenomenon. It produced muralist Aaron Douglas, and the thirties and forties introduced now well-known painters such as Jacob Lawrence, the brothers Beauford and Joseph Delaney, Archibald Motley, Lois Mailou Jones, and Hale Woodruff, but their works were not widely exhibited until years later. So, when a young African American of the 1940s and '50s, being educated in the Eurocentric tradition, found himself interested in fine, color, composition, texture, light, and the allure of gessoed canvas and creamy paper, sable brushes and viscid paints, he had few directions in which to grow other than along the trellis of Western art.

Clarence Major was gifted, as his early experiences with both words and paints make clear, and he was endowed with a drive to become an artist. But his consciousness was split by the nature of being an American of African descent, in an ambivalent political relationship to the Western cultural heritage that he was beginning to love, especially as a painter. Based on my experience of Major's paintings and his fiction (Emergency Exit, My Amputations, Such Was the Season, and Fun & Games), it is apparent that his career as a writer is due, at least in part, to this early splitting of consciousness in the area of his first passion, painting. For years Major deferred, almost even denied, his passion for painting a passion whose nature - more obviously Eurocentric and less practical than that of his writing - threatened to alienate him from his African-American community ("Necessary Distance" 202-05). In a sense, he went underground with his painting and got into the habit of seeing through his writing, which was easier to conceal. The painting however, remained a motivating force in his literary work. Major's questions about his own identity as an African American and his relationship to the African-American community seem to have led him to become a man of double vision, searching for a colorful but color-blind existence, both through the visual image and the written word.

Major remembers "being the kind of kid that just gravitated toward visual expression," and he says that painting came "more naturally" to him than writing. He still recalls being entranced by a kindergarten assignment to draw a "big, red apple," which he took home and proudly showed to his mother (Major, telephone interview). By the time Major was twelve, his paintings were spilling out of his bedroom into the family's hall. He won "many prizes" in school art contests. One of these awards, granted when he was in high school, provided a scholarship to a program for school-age children at the Art Institute of Chicago, and he stayed with these lessons until he left home to join the Air Force (Major, "Licking Stamps" 177-79).

It was a formative period for Major, not strictly because of the scholarship program, but because he also met some regular college- and graduate-level Art Institute faculty and students who encouraged him and provided an even greater level of awareness on his part. One of these, graduate student Gus Nall gave Major private lessons, which he still values today, even though he says that at that time he was "still trying to paint just like van Gogh" (telephone interview), whose large exhibit at the Art Institute in the early 1950s had greatly impressed him.

Major found himself answering the "perennial challenge to Afro-American artists"; that is, "how to be at once Black and artist, Afro-American and American, Afrocentric and idiosyncratic" (Yearwood 138). At first, it didn't even occur to him to search for an identity as an African-American artist; he considered himself, insofar as he did so at all as part of the mainstream and worried because he "didn't want to be an Abstract Expressionist" or to work in other "popular modes" (telephone interview). But he had an awareness that, on the South Side of Chicago, "no self-respecting grown man spent ten years painting pictures he couldn't sell" ("Necessary Distance" 204), and during the late sixties he under-stood that a large part of the problem was the result of racism. He has said for the record that the "black poet ... must chop away at the white criterion and destroy its hold on his black mind because seeing the world through white eyes from a black soul causes death" (Dark and Feeling 147). During this period he moved away from painting but was soon engaged in it again, and was highly influenced by discussions such as the one he had with painter Jacob Lawrence for The Black Scholar in 1977. Lawrence pointed out the "definite style and tradition" visible in "Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and African art," which he said, he couldn't see in African-American art: