By Victor Greto
WILMINGTON — One diamond-blue winter sunny day soon after folk artist Eunice LaFate had moved here from her native Jamaica, she went outside to feel what her eyes saw: warmth.
“No one told me what the winter would be like when I got here,” LaFate, 60, says from her home on East 9th Street near downtown. “I saw the sun and assumed it would be warm.”
She came right back into the house.
That was more than 20 years ago, when she came to live in the U.S. a year after she had met and fallen in love with her future husband while visiting a friend in Wilmington.
Inside the house, she started painting. “It was a culture-shock response,” she says.
Today, her home is cluttered with the colorfully-vibrant results of her winter painting obsession, oils, acrylics and watercolors whose themes range from tropical blossoms and landscapes to children, racial harmony, diversity and Caribbean folk culture.
“So much of her work is about empowerment,” says Michael Miller, who runs the Delaware Folklife Program for the division of parks and recreation in Dover.
“Her work contains expressive values of the dignity of human life,” he says. “Its empowering motifs say to everyone, ‘You matter.’”
Although she finds inspiration in the vivid colors of Van Gogh, she finds more in Grandma Moses, the quintessential American folk artist, and Bill Traylor, a former Alabama slave whose 1,800 works were produced after he started painting at the age of 83 in 1939.
LaFate has had no formal training in art.
“I’m called a folk artist because I paint from the heart,” she says. “I don’t have to follow line and perspective. What’s important is the message that the piece reflects.”
Her paintings repeatedly drive home a message that glorifies diversity and children.
It’s a message that has gotten national attention.
Two of her paintings, “The Melting Pot vs. The Salad Bowl” painted in 1997, and 1993’s “Diversity,” hang in the Bill Clinton Library in Little Rock, Ark.
In 2005, she gave a copy of 1992’s “At the ‘Y’,” to Willy Mays, who had grown up deeply involved in the Harlem YMCA. She also provided copies to Sammy Sosa and Hank Aaron, all of whom were speakers at the Black Achievers banquet in Wilmington that year.
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Born in the tiny village of St. Ann, Jamaica, to a family of seven sisters and two brothers, LaFate recalls her farmer-father and seamstress-mother telling their children: “We have no money, but we will give you education, and then you can get all the money you want.”
Like most children, she started drawing early, but did not pursue it as a craft or art until she moved to the U.S.
She graduated from the University of the West Indies with a B.A. in General Studies and History. She also got a degree in teaching from Mico Teachers College there.
She was working as a women’s teacher college in Jamaica, when she visited a friend in Wilmington, and met her future husband.
“I came here for love,” she says.
They have one son, Jermaine, 23.
Aside from the weather, the catalyst for becoming serious about her art was her volunteer work at the Walnut Street YMCA.
“When I got here, it was the Y that gave me a strong sense of community,” she says.
She was a team leader and decided that the painting she had begun as a leisure activity when she first immigrated to the U.S. could be used to help raise money.
“I had a vision, and a voice spoke to me that I had talent, and that people would buy my work,” she says.
She produced 17 pieces to exhibit in 1992, raising $2,000.
She’s been painting seriously ever since.
Three years ago, she earned a state artist fellowship grant. With the money, she painted 18 pieces and a self-published a catalog of many of her works. The catalog is available at the Ninth Street Bookstore in Wilmington.
She recently decided to make a concerted effort to sell her work on the Internet.
“I’ve such a large inventory now,” she says. “Art never depreciates.”
It’s LaFate’s authenticity that earned her a spot at the ongoing Blue Ball Barn Delaware Folk Art exhibition, Miller says.
“Essentially, fine art is hierarchical, and is taught in institutions,” Miller says, explaining the difference between what many consider “folk art” and “fine art.”
“Fine art follows a specific canon of aesthetics or techniques, within a tightly defined realm,” he says. “Folk art belongs to everybody, and relates a community aesthetic.”
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For LaFate, that community aesthetic has evolved from a concentration on her native Caribbean culture toward the celebration of a racial and communal diversity.
It may be no coincidence that some of the richest colors of her art seem to be in her work dealing with Caribbean folk culture, including “Folk Dance,” “Golf in the Tropics” and “Storyteller.”
If the faces of the people portrayed in her art often are smudged or washed out, it’s to relate a universal message of harmony, she says.
“I have no reason to study art,” LaFate says. “It would taint what I’m doing. When I pick up my brush, I want to be free.”
To see LaFate’s work, visit http://www.lafategallery.com.