ARTS AND LEISURE DESK

ART; A 2,000-Mile Forage for Folk Art

By DUDLEY CLENDINEN

For the next eight days, as I rode with them on a trip of more than 2,000 miles along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, through major and middling cities and small towns and down desolate back country roads, they foraged for folk art across north Florida, Alabama and Georgia. The journey took us through towns like Niceville, Cottondale and Hurtsboro, into poor city neighborhoods and down narrow alleyways, out past strip malls where B. J.'s Fireworks and Tri-State Casket Sales stand side by side, where springs, rivers and lakes are named Wakulla, Chipola and Dead and church signs say ''Free Trip to Heaven: Details Inside.''

It was a buying trip but an emotional journey, too, among the sweet, naïve, and dazzlingly eccentric tribe of people across the country who are driven to make art, for reasons that often seem mystical or nostalgic. Ms. Kronsnoble and Ms. Clayton were trying to find and buy from 13 different artists, all of whom they knew. But some were growing old. Not all have street addresses. Or phones. Not all who have phones answer them. In the end, they found 11, packing the van in an intricate puzzle that grew to 150 pieces.

It is a trip the two women have made every year or two for a decade for a joint show they mount in Tampa in the winter. For art dealers -- urban creatures, as a rule -- it is also a trip that comes with certain hazards. ''Uuggghhhhh,'' Ms. Clayton said one day, holding her head after lunch at Betty's Bar-B-Q in Anniston, Ala. ''If I have any more sugar and fat, I think my head will explode.''

Dealers around the country have been making similar trips at least since the collectors Chuck and Jan Rosenak crossed America in the mid-1970's, sent by the Museum of American Folk Art in New York to discover if there were still untrained, naïve artists at work in the nation. Much of the professional art world thought such primitive creation had mostly ceased as the broader culture grew more modern. But from New Mexico to the South Bronx, the Rosenaks found hundreds of self-taught artists, uncommissioned, unknown yet productive, guided only by faith, vision, talent and compulsion.

In Fayette, Ala., they met Jimmy Lee Sudduth, whose palette was a bucket of mud, fortified with molasses, colored by vegetables and plants. In north Georgia, they found the man who came to personify folk art in appearances with Johnny Carson on ''The Tonight Show,'' the twangy Rev. Howard Finster, who seemed equally obsessed with God and Coca-Cola. The Reverend was chatty but strict. He wouldn't let Chuck Rosenak buy any of his art until he had baptized him ''Brother Chuck.'' He didn't want to offend the Lord by selling outside the faith.

Jeanne Kronsnoble discovered folk art in the north Georgia mountains near her summer house about 15 years after the Rosenaks had been through. Now her commodious Main Street Gallery in Clayton, Ga. -- east of Paradise Garden, the art-filled environment Finster created around his house -- has an inventory of almost 1,000 modern primitive pieces. She knows most of the region's naïve artists. Cathy Clayton holds their joint show at the Clayton Gallery in Tampa, where she normally shows the work of established contemporary Florida artists. But the lust for folk art in Tampa has grown to fever pitch. ''They're already circling,'' Ms. Clayton said, laughing, as Ms. Kronsnoble drove through the twilight toward O. L. Samuels's house in a Tallahassee suburb that Sunday night. ''We have people who want to help us unload the van.''

First, however, they had to fill it. They had stopped in early afternoon at a large fenced property on the rim road outside Tallahassee, where the woman who signs herself Missionary Mary L. Proctor waited in flowing clothes, dark glasses, a red turban and a smile. Part black and part white in ancestry, always ebullient at 43, she turned her junk yard into a giant outdoor studio in 1995 after she asked the Lord for guidance one day and the Lord said, ''Paint.'' She started painting everything around her, including some old windows and doors, with stories of life and faith. She became known for her painting when Tricia Collins, a dealer from New York, happened by, bought 10 doors for about $5,000 and sold some of them in SoHo in 1996 for $5,000 apiece.

Some days, if she prays and meditates four to six hours in the morning, Mary Proctor said, she finds that she can make 10 or 20 pieces of art -- especially small ones -- all in a rush. ''I don't know what I am,'' she said cheerfully. ''I just know what I believe.''

Ms. Kronsnoble smiled at her. ''Mary,'' she said. ''We need to talk a little business.''

The dealers drove off with a window for which they paid about $1,000, and 20 lesser Mary Proctor pieces packed away so carefully that they hardly made a dent in the van's empty space. The window would sell for $2,000, the small pieces for as little as $100. But as Ms. Kronsnoble called ahead on her cellphone, the good feeling turned glum. ''Mose is off the list,'' she said quietly. Mose Tolliver, of Montgomery, Ala., whom Nancy Reagan had posed with and proclaimed her favorite of all the black folk artists displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1982, had become increasingly confused and hostile in the last year. He was either 84 or 88. His family thought he had Alzheimer's. And Jimmy Lee Sudduth, who had been hospitalized with pneumonia, wasn't getting better. He was 94. ''Jimmy Lee's too sick,'' Ms. Kronsnoble said with a grim look, putting down the cellphone as she drove. ''He's too sick to see us.''

''Oh, no,'' Ms. Clayton said. ''Oh, nooooo.'' For years on these trips, they had sat in the back yard with Jimmy Lee as he painted, and on the bed with Mose, who painted there because his legs were crippled.

''We're going to have to find some new ones, aren't we, Cathy?'' Ms. Kronsnoble said after a moment. ''Because they're dying.''

For people drawn to folk art, the relationship to the art and artists can be intensely sentimental, in part because the art is so personal, but also because the artists can be so emotional. ''I love that piece,'' one of them will say. ''And I love that piece. And I really love that piece.'' Some sell things and then try to get them back. There is also the fact that the artists are such anomalies, so quaint and so vulnerable. They spring from a place in the culture that seems forever vanishing.

A very few, like Woodie Long, 61, of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., do very well. His father, one of 18 children, was a white sharecropper in Alabama. Woodie was a field hand and a house painter with 76 first cousins who decided to start painting his memories for his children in 1987. He calculates that he has made 17,000 paintings since. His wife, Dot, his business manager, controls the sales and prices -- which range from hundreds to thousands of dollars -- with great care. Mr. Long now lives, paints, raises vegetables and feeds migrating birds on three acres of land. He is commonly thought to earn several hundred thousand dollars a year and supports his fellow Alabama folk artists by buying hundreds of their works. He is enthusiastic about the clan, which he feels part of. ''Jimmy Lee -- he's my idol,'' Mr. Long said, standing in his studio. ''We all love each other.''

But many of the others seem to live and work alone, possessed by their visions, oblivious to other art. Like James (Buddy) Snipe, who lives deep in east Alabama in a sagging house with six dead cars in the yard and a ruined shed and a rusting auctioneer's trailer from which he pulls fantastic creations made from branches, glass and metal junk and other things he finds. (''Those are real foots on there,'' he said, pointing proudly at a peacock with convincing feet. ''Turkey foots.'') Some, like Mr. Long, are illiterate, or semiliterate. But they live much more precariously than he does. The art dealers and gallery owners who come to see them may be their only sources of income, their main connections to the larger world.

It is a relationship that begs for trust, one easily abused. All the artists on the trip talked of dealers who took advantage of them. ''They'll come, and they want to take your art away, and you never hear from them again,'' said Chris Clark. He is only 45, one of the most urbane of naïve artists. He makes an array of things out of wood, paint and cloth, including dream quilts that his grandmother taught him to stitch, in a loft up some stairs in an old factory building in Birmingham, Ala., behind a yellow door. Still, he took bad checks and entrusted 50 or 60 pieces to dealers who never called or sent him money before he learned to say no.

''Now Jeanne, I've been dealing with her so long until I trust her,'' he said. He, like Woodie Long and Mary Proctor and the others, said Ms. Kronsnoble always pays the price she bargains for. Usually she doubles that in the gallery and New York galleries might multiply it two to four or five times more.

But these are not easy relationships for gallery owners either. Folk artists who are hard up sometimes use their dealers as bankers, asking for cash advances against future work. ''You don't know what it's like to be poor,'' O. L. Samuels said when Ms. Kronsnoble and Ms. Clayton settled into the living room of the modest house he rents outside Tallahassee that first Sunday night.

''Oh, O. L.'' Ms. Kronsnoble said, lowering her head. ''Please don't put me through a guilt trip.''

He is a tall, handsome black man of 72, a former prizefighter with two heart attacks, great style and no education. He makes large, elegant, glittering pelicans, llamas, dogs and running birds from pieces of trees. It is singular work. But he often hocks his sculptures for $100 or $150 at a Tallahassee pawnshop, which sells them to a local collector before the pawn tickets come due.

''People say, 'You shouldn't put your art in there,' '' Mr. Samuels said, his voice softly musical and resigned as he moved about in the dim room. ''But they don't know I have to pay the rent.'' He owed $650 in rent and $400 to the power company, and he didn't have the money. Ms. Kronsnoble, who had advanced him more than $1,000 against work that was nowhere to be seen -- pawned, probably -- did not protest. She sat and bargained for more, because O. L. Samuels is moved by a spirit that folk-art lovers treasure, one that makes ordinary things seem magical and that they fear will some day disappear.

''You know,'' Mr. Samuels said, looking lovingly at the pelican he had made that would later fetch $1,450 at the Clayton Gallery. ''I got a spirit be in me. It be for real. The first time, it scared me. It was like a shadow in me. But now I've gotten used to it. There is always a dot or something there -- to tell me where to put my eye.''

Ms. Kronsnoble and Ms. Clayton looked at him. And then they gave him a check made out to his landlord and cash to pay the bills that were due. He helped them carry out the Pelican, the Running Bird, Happy Dog and some other pieces. They loaded the van, gave him a hug and a tender look -- and drove into the night.

CAPTIONS: Photos: The folk art dealer Jeanne Kronsnoble, on her annual buying trip, stopping at the Birmingham, Ala., studio of Chris Clark.; Ms. Kronsnoble and Cathy Clayton with the artist Missionary Mary L. Proctor; below, O. L. Samuels. (Photographs by Gary Tramontina for The New York Times)