Artist Jacob Lawrence grew up in Harlem during the 1920s and 30s and from an early age was fascinated by the sights and scenes around him. His mother was strict about going to church and she was also the primary reason that Jacob attended the free art classes available to children in the area after school.
This combination of an inspiring environment, the fiery Sunday sermons of the preachers, talk heard on street corners and working with color and form led Jacob to create his own style of narrative painting. Not just one picture but as many as sixty in a series, all on panels with accompanying text -- art that told a story, and in particular the stories of his neighbors and family and friends.
Lawrence's The Migration of The Negro series made him famous in 1941, and was immediately purchased by The Museum of Modern Art and The Phillips Collection. The Phillips Collection bought the odd numbered panels (there are 60 total) and they have a great website on Jacob Lawrence's life and career. This later painting (Eight Studies for the Book of Genesis No. 5 - And God created all the fowl of the air and the fishes of the seas) was done in 1989 and you can see how Lawrence still had the brightness of vision and vivid sense of color that he'd had 50 years earlier.
"I didn't think in terms of history...It was like I was doing a portrait of something. If it was a portrait, it was a portrait of myself, a portrait of my family, a portrait of my peers." (Jacob Lawrence, 1917 - 2000)
