Major women

Clarence Major is a rare human being. He’s lived a life in which art—in most of its forms—consumes him. His latest book of poems, Myself Painting (LSU Press), gives tangibility to the feeling one gets when creating art and Major’s latest figurative paintings are of women. Lots of women. But the artistic process is just as important as the subject, or the poem, he explains. “When the painting pushes me out of it, when I know there is nothing else I can do, hopefully it has taken on a ‘life’ of its own, it’s become an entity unto itself,” he says.