Rising Fawn Folk Art Presents
Mose Tolliver

 See His Works 

Mose Tolliver was born in 1915 near Pintala, Alabama, and died in 2006.

In the late sixties the hours of idle time spawned his creativity. Mose worked with "pure house paint" on plywood - creating whimsical, haunting and sometimes erotic pictures of wonderfully balanced animals, humans and flora. A "Quail Bird" may glide over a cotton field or a spread-leg "Diana" may be straddled over "An Exercise Rack Bicycle." Self portraits with crutches was a repeated image. The artist was dyslexic, which may have encouraged his artistic efforts by limiting his reading and writing abilities. He would often turn his paintings upsidedown and paint the picture of perhaps an animal and landscape positioned from various directions. Tolliver's titles exhibited a fantastic imagination: "Smoke Charlies", "Scopper Bugs", or "Jick Jack Suzy Satisfying her own Self".

Tolliver was one of the most sociable artists. He often welcomed the many visitors who came to purchase his work. Although he received many requests for "another watermelon", he filled the order using the request as just another chance to solve some riddle of balancing the green with the large red crescent.

His work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia College of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.