Helen pictured in studio, circa 1997.
Helen LaFrance (1919-2020)
Helen LaFrance is a significant American self-taught artist and memory painter who gained recognition in the 1980's, although she painted almost all her life. Like a kaleidoscope with multifaceted prisms reflecting light, LaFrance's artistry suggests, multiple meanings within multiple contexts.
Helen pictured in school bus studio, circa 1992.
This versatile creator may be studied from various perspectives — as a regional Southern artist, an African American artist, a female artist, a memory painter, and a contemporary American artist.
Not unlike Horace Pippin, Helen's prodigious creative output is not limited to one genre. In addition to her memory paintings, she was a master quilter, a skilled wood carver, and an interpreter of the Bible with her visionary paintings. Born in 1919, Helen grew up the second of four girls on her family’s farm in rural Graves County, Kentucky. Her father was not a sharecropper. He owned his land, which was unusual for an African American in the Jim Crow South. She picked cotton, hoed tobacco, chopped wood, and worked in the chicken house. She has fond memories of her childhood. Perhaps that is why she is so good at capturing what life was like. Her parents bought schoolbooks in town and taught her at home. After her work and lessons were finished, she could do what she wanted . . . and that was to draw.
She was inspired and nurtured by her mother. They made colors from dandelions, walnut bark, berries, and bluing. She painted on large tablets and leftover wallpaper. She went to school for a few years and got as far as eighth grade but then returned to work on the farm. She was 10 years old when the stock market crashed. At the end of World War II, she was 27. She was 50 years old in 1969 during the Vietnam War. She witnessed the Great Depression and segregation.
In her 40s, Helen eventually made enough money to buy art supplies and began painting between loading dried tobacco onto conveyor belts in the tobacco barns, cleaning offices, and painting novelty whiskey bottles at a ceramics plant. In 1986, she began painting full time.
Helen LaFrance lived her entire life close to where she grew up outside of Mayfield, KY. She
died peacefully in her sleep in late 2020 at the age of 101.