Le Suitcase de Jules Vern: Ammi Phillips

So I collect things, or essentially, I'm a pack rat. And one of those collections is Postcards. Odd ones, random ones, vintage ones, funny ones, etc.

The last time I visited The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, I went into the gift shop and found that two of my favorite Amon Carter paintings came in the form of a little mailable postcard!

One of the two postcards, that I ended up purchasing, was a small print of Girl with Cat (Miss Catherine Van Slyck Dorr) Oil on Canvas, c. 1814. Painted by Ammi Phillips, American, 1788-1865, he traveled through Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, and was considered an American folk artist.

I am not a good painter by any means, I can paint shapes and forms and even people, by my shading is a travesty. Ammi can shade...but he can't make a person's eyeballs even. And I like that.

Most of his work, like a lot of the early American folk art, is very simple, raw, and a little cartoonish almost. I know that Ammi was self taught, and maybe this was the styles that he preferred but here are the fictional conclusions I have made up in my head as to why his portraits look do not look very three dimensional and real.

Ammi was a traveling man, going door to door with paints and a canvas in hand. He knocked on the doors of the bottom tier of wealthy. Those that had a few wads of money to spare, but not enough to get a multiple day sitting painting, these people could only afford the one afternoon painting. Ammi could give them that and he could also give them buy 2 get one 1 free deals.

Ammi was a cynical sort of man, he thought people were vile pieces of rubbish. Therefore as he convinced his subjects that he was painting them a beautiful portrait he secretly was harboring resentment towards them as well as the rest of the human race. So he tried to characiture-ize them as much as possible whilst still being able to get away with it. They were humans certainly, but he brought out that they were only hollow shells with imperfections.

Ammi was a fashionable man. A man of the times and sitting on the cutting edge of art. Ammi knew that super realism was soooooo yesterday, and he was not about to be considered an old man behind in the times. Today the minimalistic folk art look was in, and he was participating in that movement whole heartedly. He would paint at night while his musician friends sat in a semi-circle strumming their lutes and tooting on their woodsy reed flutes.

Certainly none of this is true. I think this was just his signature style. But I honestly really do like Ammi's work. There's something quite simple and amusing about it.

Here is some more. Enjoy.