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p. 81
W1

CELESTINE WARE_WBAI
3-5-1971

5

MINNIE EVANS

now. I have one in Detroit and my baby boy is home. He and his family.

C.W. Are you the only one in the family who paints? Are you the only one who paints?

M.E. I'm the only one that paint. Now I have a grandson, Norris. He do very good at paint sketching. (C.W. Yes) and but it doesn't last him long. If he sketches one or two pictures now he won't bother with it no more for the next three or four months.

C.W. I see, yes. Not like you? How did you start to paint?

M.E. I started with my first little painting in '35. No, my grandmother died in '35 in '30 (1930) on a Good Friday, one Easter in the big living room. I was sitting down there. I had wrote my grocery order and after I tore that off then I had taken my pencil and went to making some funny things. I don't know why but I just kept right on making a lot of funny things and I made a page full and that Saturday when I got back there I got another page and went to painting some more funny things. Well I didn't bother those anymore untils my grandmother died in '35 and two or three weeks after that I went to painting and writing a little more of those things. Well I didn't bother those things any more. I taken and folded them up and put them in a magazine (C.W. For how many years?) carried them home and just didn't bother with them anymore. So what started me again when I went home I started to clean up, throwing away old books. I carried them out in my yard and set them afire to burn them up. So all of the books and old magazines everything burned up except that magazine with those three paintings in them. (C.W. Oh! yes) When I pulled them together to make a bigger fire of them they fell out. I had taken them out and said here's those paintings. These things I did. I had forgotten them. They carried them back over to the house and then the bug got me. (laughter) (C.W. Yes, right. So then what did you...) So then, ever since then I have been painting. Sometime I do two and three pictures a day. My husband tried to stop me and so did my mother.

C.W. Why did they try to stop you?