When Sam Mockbee died, somewhere down South a tree fell—big as an oak, a 57-year marvel in its own place, it drew sustenance from generations of loam and deep water, weathered storms and bent and grew broad, threw off shade and color for all that came and sat beneath it, sheltered all comers, an elemental force that rained out new growth, and, on December 30, returned to its own soil.

If art is seeing and making, to an uncommon degree Sam Mockbee had the soul of an artist. Although a gifted tale-teller, Sambo’s métier was not the written word, the usual currency of his region, but graphic and plastic expression. “You know, what I really love to do is make prints,” he confessed in a honeyed drawl from a porch swing more than 20 years ago, after hearing Mississippi writers Shelby Foote and Ellen Gilchrist read from their own work. In the studio, this bearded, Richardsonian man lightly skimmed over a drawing board in a far corner of the room, apparently burning with his art, perpetually encircled by a haze of smoke from colored pencils and spray paint and student breath; then the drawings would emerge from a messy pile of tracing paper and blow the room clean.