William Hawkins’ optimism and bold artistic vision infused his art with an immediacy and a rare communicative strength. Hawkins was born in 1895 on a farm near Lexington, Kentucky. In addition to farmwork, he broke his horses; in 1916, when he was a young man, he moved to Columbus, Ohio. Throughout his life, Hawkins, like other African Americans with little formal education, held blue-collar jobs, one of which was hauling salvaged materials and building supplies. He had been interested in art from childhood, but it was only after he retired that he started indulging his creativity. Encouraged to enter an art competition at the Ohio State Fair in 1982, he won a prize for his painting of the local Atlas Building; he was eighty-seven years old. He found inspiration for his images in a collection of newspaper, magazine, and book illustrations, stored in an old suitcase. He used a single stubby brush and mixed enamel directly on large plywood boards and Masonite.

The inspiration for this robust painting was a motor inn in Columbus that had been demolished some years earlier. Amazingly, the building’s two-hundred-foot smokestack survived. William L, Hawkins highlighted it by building it out with a compound of cornmeal and paint. Situated on an otherwise flat ground, the chimney lends texture to the whole, along with an element of surprise, something the artist always sought.

Like many of Hawkins’s architectural paintings, Neil House with Chimney was executed in a flattened style with quick-drying enamels in a bright palette of red, yellow, and green against black and white. The stacked windows of various shapes, the stylized brick chimney, the scumbled sky, and the decorative painted frame create a certain ordered chaos—the painting bursts with energy, but all is under control. As always, Hawkins’s signature appears in the lower right-hand border along with the date and place of his birth—“Born KY, July 27, 1895.”

Lee Kogan, "Neil House with Chimney," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 399.