FAYETTE, AL.- African-American folk artist Jimmy Lee Sudduth, 97, died. He was a self-taught artist who used his own homemade paint made of mud, berries, sugar, coffee, paint, straw and other elements. His work had been exhibited at the the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife and the Corcoran Gallery, and museums in Fayette, Montgomery, Birmingham, and New Orleans. He smudged and traced the paint on sheets of metal, boards and other materials he found.

Susan Mitchell Crawley, curator at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts said in 2005, “No one can top Sudduth, at his best, for gorgeous surface texture, color sense, or, of course, technical innovation."

Suduth once said, “You see that black mud? All you got to do is take that black mud and put you a little sugar in it. Stir it up and sweeten it, add a little water and you can paint all day. I don't like to use paint too much.”