“I don’t stay still in art, in life, in thinking, in feeling.”

Connell was a regional artist and was inspired by the nature, and people of the Louisiana Bayou. She grew up in a segregated American South in a period known for lynchings. Exposure to Black culture of the South at the black congregations she went to as a child and the penal farm her husband supervised affected her works. She volunteered at a Presbyterian church school for black children and was terrorized by night riders circling the schoolhouse to frighten her and the children. During one of these incidents Connell conjured up the sounds of the “swamp orchestra,” sounds of night herons, owls, frogs, cicadas, crickets, and the winds of the Louisiana night. Years later she recorded this night music with intricate calligraphic notations on large rolls of brown paper, which she called her “swamp songs.” She explored regional themes of social conscience, nature, sound, and a deep spiritual world. She used the nature around her Lake Bistineau cottage home to inspire her style saying “you are in different world. It became a part of me. Where the moss swooped down, I wanted my sculpture to look like it grew out of the earth and was trying to touch the moss.” Her sculptures are known for slender constructions of found objects often covered in a “skin” made of macerated newspaper, brown paper, and Elmer’s glue. Connell often applied broken pieces of metal, tools, or other found objects that her son Bryan brought to her by the truckload. Her yard, studio, and home were littered with completed compositions, works in progress, and scraps that eventually found their way into her sculpture.

Thought I’d throw down some sculpture of my own. An assemblage of found materials. Materials found on Wikipedia.

I encourage your donations.

Old enough to remember when I had to go downtown to the library. If there was a downtown. If there was a library.

If I could get there.

From the Mists and Moss of the Bayou, Clyde Connell Sculpts Her Unique Folk Art

By Cheryl McCall for People magazine. Updated July 05, 1982

Most sculptors seek inspiration from their environment. Clyde Connell of Belcher, La. finds her materials there. Out of the tangled underbrush of a Louisiana bayou, she has created works in cedar, cypress and rattan that are at once sophisticated, primitive and as beguiling as her weathered face. Though she’s been turning out her constructions of natural and found objects for 30 years, Connell is just now, at 81, gaining national recognition, with exhibits scheduled this year in Texas, Florida, Mississippi and New York. “Her work is incredible!” raves Leo Castelli, the Manhattan dealer and arbiter of what’s hot in American art. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I can’t place it in any context. I would rank it very high.”

Connell’s towering eight-foot obelisks and totemic Posts and Gates, with price tags up to $8,000, are fashioned from skeletons of trees found in the bayou, covered with a sheath of macerated paper and glue, which hardens into a skin. She sometimes implants rusted chains, gaskets or bolts in a geometric pattern.

Though Connell has earned a living from her art and has averaged five exhibits a year since the mid-’50s, she was largely unknown outside of Louisiana until 1978, when Murray Smither, co-owner of Dallas’ Delahunty Gallery, took an interest in her work; two years later he began exhibiting it. “She’s someone whose work has long been overlooked, but that’s always been a problem with artists so removed from art centers,” explains Smither. “If the artist isn’t commercially oriented and isn’t out there pushing her stuff, she doesn’t get recognition. I’m delighted that she’s getting attention now because people need to see Clyde’s work—it’s that far along.”

Clyde Connell is a tiny woman whose independent, free-thinking opinions often scandalized the hamlet of Belcher (pop. 485), where she was born Clyde Dixon in 1901. The eldest of nine children of a cotton planter whose family emigrated from Edinburgh, Scotland, she and the firstborn of four other Scottish planters were all named Clyde, regardless of sex, after the river in their homeland. “My mother was a real old-time Southern lady, very dignified and serious,” Clyde recalls. “She had breakfast in bed every morning, and work was not in her vocabulary.”

Clyde attended classes in a one-room schoolhouse until eighth grade and quickly discovered her major interests were art and music. After a year at Georgia’s Brenau College (“It seemed to me I was just wasting my time”), Clyde dropped out in 1920 and two years later married T.D. (for Thomas Dixon) Connell, a cotton planter who had moved to Belcher.

She had wanted to go to art school to continue her studies, “but that just wasn’t done by young girls in those days,” she says. Instead, while raising two sons and a daughter (“We had servants then”), she trained herself in art by studying catalogs and painting. “I didn’t announce it. I just did it,” she recounts. She was equally determined about civil rights, doing volunteer church teaching in black communities, even in the ’30s. “I was ostracized in Belcher,” she says. “One of my brothers called me a Communist. It was rough. But it didn’t take a lot of courage, because that’s what I believed in.”

Her civil rights work sent her to cities outside Louisiana where she saw museums, galleries and, in Manhattan, Abstract Expressionist painting by Pollock, de Kooning and Kline. Under their influence in the mid-’50s, she shifted from representational character studies to Abstract Expressionism. Later she turned to sculpture, first in plaster, then in steel, which she found to be too expensive. “I had to look around for something I could constantly work with and handle myself,” she explains. The answer was nearby in the various woods, vines and Spanish moss of the bayou country.

At one time Connell worked in an abandoned milk house on the Caddo Parish Penal Farm, where her husband was superintendent for 10 years. When he retired in 1959, they moved to a roomy stone-and-log cabin on Lake Bistineau, 25 miles southeast of Shreveport. Each morning she still rises at dawn and sits alone on their pier with a cup of coffee, planning her day’s work. By 8 a.m. she is either hammering or sawing in her studio or tramping through the forest with a ladder and outsize clippers searching for the perfect piece of rattan.

Clyde has hired an assistant who helps to construct the basic form from her verbal instructions. “I have an idea when I start. I never draw it first, it’s all in my head,” she explains. “An artist keeps things as simple as possible to be able to spend time on the work. I always encourage young artists to do their work in their own way, even if it never sells,” she adds. “But of course, I was always lucky enough to be able to eat, too.”

Clyde Connell, 97, Sculptor Inspired by Louisiana Bayous

By Roberta Smith for The New York Times. May 10, 1998

Clyde Connell, who became a full-time artist only in her 60’s and who was known for totemic sculptures, imposing wall reliefs and runelike drawings, died on May 2 in a hospital in Shreveport, La. She was 97 and lived in Lake Bastineau in northwestern Louisiana.

Except for some traveling, Mrs. Connell spent her entire life within a 50-mile radius of Shreveport. She was striking even in old age, with white hair and a self-contained presence that sometimes drew comparisons with Georgia O’Keeffe.

Like O’Keeffe, she drew inspiration from the region in which she lived. She used brown earth and red clay to color her drawings and sculptures, as well as bits of iron scrap that her son, Brian, a cotton farmer, found in his fields. She had a mystical view of nature and described her drawings as transcriptions of its music, heard on the bayou.

Mrs. Connell, whose name had been Minnie Clyde Dixon, was born in 1901 and grew up on a large plantation, an experience that left her with a lifelong sympathy for black people in the South and an affinity for their culture.

She married Thomas Dixon Connell Jr. in 1922 and started taking art classes in Shreveport in the mid-1920’s. Some of her first serious paintings, made in the 1950’s after her children were grown, were Expressionist portraits of black prisoners on the penal farm where her husband was a superintendent.

A decisive moment in her life as an artist came in 1952, on a trip to New York City to do social work with the Presbyterian Church. She was drawn to the color and form of abstract art, especially the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Adolph Gottlieb, and made repeated visits to the Museum of Modern Art.

By the early 1960’s she had her first permanent studio and was working full time as an artist, keeping up with developments in contemporary art through reading and travel. In the late 60’s, after making assemblages of wood and iron held together by a mixture of paper and glue, she began to use this mixture as a building material, which she colored with dirt, reinforced with sticks and embedded with found metal.

The results, partly inspired by the work of Eva Hesse, were powerful objects, mostly tall and narrow, suggesting costumed shamans, decorated trees and towers. She produced them in series with evocative titles like ”Ritual Places,” ”Habitats,” ”Ladders” and ”Nests.” Another series, of enormous wall pieces, was titled ”Swamp Songs.”

Mrs. Connell’s work became increasingly known during the 1970’s, a time characterized by stylistic pluralism, the rise of feminism and increased attention to so-called regional artists. She had her first solo show outside Louisiana at the Tyler Museum in Tyler, Tex., in 1979, and her first New York show at the Delahunty Gallery in SoHo in 1984.

Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Tex. She has been represented since 1986 by the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, where she had a show of new work in October 1997.

In addition to her son, of Lake Bistineau, Mrs. Connell is survived by a sister, Anne Sewell of Boyce, La.; a brother, Louis Dixon of Baton Rouge, La.; a daughter, Clyde C. Ent of Allentown, Pa., 8 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.