Welcome to the savvy painter podcast, the podcast for artists who mean business. Here's your

host, Antrice Wood.

Hello, it's Antrice and welcome to another episode of the savvy painter

podcast I have a very special guest for you today it is an enormous pleasure

and honor to speak with Ashley Bryan.

Now Ashley is a difficult person to sum up.

He can't be contained in a box or with a label.

There's too many ways to describe him. Ashley is an artist, a

storyteller, a vessel that keeps wonder from being lost. He has won the

Coretta Scott King Award and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his books on

African folklore.

He has a school named after him in Eilspord, Maine, where you will also find the Ashley

Bryan Center, where his work is permanently on display.

Ashley is an explorer who find treasure wherever he goes, a teacher, a music lover, a lover of life.

He's a 90 year old man with the exuberance and curiosity of a child and I mean that of course as the highest compliment

Ashley studied at the Cooper Union Art School in New York, one of the few, if not

the only, art schools in the early 1940s that did not have a color bar. Shortly after he went to Cooper Union he was drafted into World War II and served

as a stevedore in a segregated unit and survived the Battle of Normandy. I'm mentioning this here to put into context for you how unusual it was at that time in the

United States for Ashley to have gone to college. So I want you to keep this in mind when

Ashley talks about how he honored the other black soldiers that he served with.

Ashley and I don't spend a lot of time talking about his war experiences for two reasons.

One, if you made a graph of Ashley's life, World War II, although important and impactful, makes up a small percentage.

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