The Domino Players

Horace Pippin, a self-taught African-American artist, was born in Pennsylvania in 1888. He had difficulty at school, preferring drawing to writing. As a youngster, he won a set of colored pencils in a contest, and started drawing religious images. Although an employer wanted to send him to art school at age 14 after Pippin drew his portrait, he chose to stay to take care of his mother.


After a serious injury in the war, he had trouble drawing, but in time, he decided to try his hand at painting. At the age of forty Pippin found a way—even with his crippled right hand—to draw on wood using a hot poker. He made many burnt-wood art panels. Pippin decided to try painting with oil. He used his "good" left hand to guide his crippled right hand, which held the paintbrush, across the canvas. It took him three years to finish his first painting. Pippin went on to paint his memories of soldiers and war, and scenes from his childhood. He said, "The pictures . . . come to me in my mind and if to me it is a worthwhile picture I paint it . . .. I do over the picture several times in my mind and when I am ready to paint it I have all the details I need." He also painted historical subjects, such as Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, and scenes from the Bible. At first, he made only about four paintings per year.


He displayed his paintings in shoemaking shop windows, and two men, seeing his work, decided to have a show for him. He painted scenes from the lives of the people around him, and was known as one of the best primitive artists of his time.

Pippin was called a folk artist because he had no formal art training. He used bright colors, flat shapes, and straight lines. He did not use shading or complicated perspective. His art is also called primitive, naive, or innocent. In 1938, when he was around 50, the Museum of Modern Art included four of Pippin's paintings in a traveling museum show. He took art classes for the first time. Pippin became more and more well-known. Galleries showed his paintings, and museums began to buy his work. He made 75 paintings during the last years of his life. Just as he became famous, Pippin died.

Below quoted from the Phillips Collection webpage for this piece (click for link).

The intimate interior setting of Domino Players is characteristic of Pippin. He drew on memories of his own childhood, of family members and friends at their everyday activities—caring for children, praying, quilting, smoking, playing games—and created a portrait of African American family life in the pre-World War II era.

Pippin placed two members of his family in the center of activity. The one at the right may represent his mother, Christine, wearing a polka-dotted blouse, while a woman who may be Pippin’s grandmother smokes her pipe and observes the dominoes game. The dominoes spill toward the family matriarch, a former slave who claimed to have witnessed the hanging of John Brown in 1859. The dominoes build a wall—woman-to-woman, generation-to-generation. The boy, perhaps Pippin himself or his younger brother, John, appears lost in contemplation. He is the only male member of this group, placed protectively between two strong women. The cold whites, grays, and blacks of the barren room are complemented by the colors of the quilt and the vibrant reds placed strategically throughout the painting. The solid horizontals of the floor and table slant upward, and the doorway, window frames, and walls provide a firm vertical support for the figures.

The serenity of the scene and the Sunday evening demeanor are disturbed by the exaggerated size of the sharp open scissors on the blood-red scrap of cloth, the ferocious teeth-like flames of the coal fire, and even the tongues of red flame in the oil lamps. All are presented as disproportionate signs of danger as only a child would perceive them.

questions:

  • How many people are in this painting? What other things do you see? Is this a painting from our time? How do you know that? What clues does the painting give you? Hint: Clothing, furniture, coal cook stove, no TV or radio.
  • What story is the painting telling us? Are these ladies wealthy? Why do you know they are not? Hint: Clothing, crack in the wall, no rug on the floor, the furniture is not fancy.
  • Does it look like the family is posing for a picture? Or is this picture unposed (people behaving as they normally do)? Does it seem like a regular evening at home?
  • What is dominoes? Hint: Bring in a box of dominoes for the children to examine. Explain how to play with them.
  • What colors do you see? Why do you think the artist used these colors? Do the colors the painter used affect what you feel when you look at the painting?

activities:

Look at the artwork - notice he uses white, black and red, and that the red and white stands out. Have the students draw a picture and have only 5 items colored red and 5 items pure white. These items should be the hightlights of the picture. The rest of the picture should be done in only browns, blacks and greys.

Let each student draw the details of their family room in pencil, or give each student a black and white coloring page of a room in the house, ideally the family room. Have them use reds and oranges to highlight important areas.

Encourage children to draw the place where their families are in the portrait, as well as the people. Refer to reproductions. For example, in The Domino Players, how do we know they are in the kitchen? Remind children to include details, as the artist did to show what the family members are doing.

To illustrate the effect of color, let each child fold a piece of paper in two. Use grays and neutrals to draw and color a 'sad' picture on the one side, then use brights to draw a 'happy' picture on the other side. An easy way to emphasize feeling is to use weather too, a sunny day versus a cloudy or rainy day.

Let the children be guided by the painting, and share with the classroom what they like to do on a cold gloomy day outside. Make sure they stay on topic though! If there is time, let them draw what they like to do on such a day.

Resources:

An additional kid friendly resource at the AHML is "Horace Pippin" by Mike Venezia. "I tell my heart : the art of Horace Pippin" by Judith Stein et al, provides indepth information to volunteers about the artist.