Attributed to Mattie Lou O'Kelley, private collection, no coa medium: oil measurements: 29"X40"h mint condition Biography: Mattie Lou O'Kelley was an American folk artist. Mattie Lou O'Kelley lived most of her life in isolation. Born on a farm in Georgia, she attended school until ninth grade but then quit to help out at home. Like many self-taught artists of the twentieth century, Georgia-born Emily Mattie Lou O'Kelley came to painting later in life. O'Kelley was a latecomer to the field of art: it was not until her retirement at age 60 in 1968 that she began to paint, as a hobby. She painted mostly images of the Georgia countryside, including farm scenes that hearkened back to her childhood. She was discovered by Robert Bishop, at one time the director of the American Folk Art Museum and Gudmund Vigtel, a former director of the High Museum in Atlanta, after O'Kelley had taken a bus with some of her paintings to see Vigtel in Atlanta. Bishop called her "a true American primitive -- self-taught, an exquisite recorder of time and place".Her work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the High Museum of Art.