TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A renowned folk artist with Moultrie ties has passed away, according to a Tallahassee news website.

Ossie Lee “O.L.” Samuels, who worked as a tree surgeon in Moultrie until a serious accident in 1982, died Thursday, July 6, 2017, according to a story in The Tallahassee News, www.tallahasseenews.com.

That accident confined him to a wheelchair for a lengthy recovery and opened the door to depression, according to postings on multiple art sites, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum at americanart.si.edu.

“He became deeply despondent during his slow mental and physical recovery until he remembered that his grandmother, a freed slave, told him for depression one should carve on a wooden spool. Samuels picked up some wood and began to carve,” recounts the Main Street Gallery in Clayton, Ga., on its website, mainstreetgallery.net.

The first public exposure of his wood carvings was when he entered several pieces as part of a local artists exhibition at the Colquitt County Arts Center in 1984, according to Brooks Sheldon. Sheldon’s wife, the late Susan Sheldon, was director of the Arts Center at the time.

She and Arts Center visual arts director Jane Simpson encouraged Samuels to continue his work with wood, Brooks Sheldon recalled. The Arts Center and its patrons were the first to purchase his works, which reside now in many Colquitt County homes, Sheldon said.

Samuels’ work is included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Md., and the Museum of American Folk Art in NYC among many others, Main Street Gallery reports. His art has also been exhibited at The White House. He is featured in several major books on the subject of contemporary folk art.

Samuels, who had moved to Tallahassee, returned to Moultrie for an exhibit of his work in 2002. He told The Observer at that time that his first piece was carved from a two-by-four.

“First it looked like a duck, then a goose, then a deer,” Samuels remembered. “I put horns on it, then cut them off.”

When he finished, the piece was a mule’s head so he made a body and legs for it.

“It was the ugliest thing I ever saw,” he laughed.

Simpson was the first one to suggest he make money with his art, Samuels said.

”I tried to borrow $50 from her,” he recalled. “She said ‘Why don’t you sell some of this stuff?'”

“His house was full of stuff that he’d carved,” added Simpson. “It was everywhere.”

He said that Simpson later sold his first piece for $700. At the time of that show, some of his pieces were selling for $10,000.

A man known for his faith, Samuels returned again when four of his pieces went up for auction as part of the Ramsey Pidcock estate in 2010. Each piece he creates is unique, and he dedicates every one of them to God, he told The Observer at that time.

“I see things in the wood,” Samuels said, “and I try to get them out. The Spirit is in my work, and I dedicate each piece to God.”

The article in Friday’s Tallahassee News is a first-person farewell from writer Michael E. Abrams, who identified himself as a friend of Samuels.

“He was prolific, if anything,” Abrams wrote, “and his wood carvings of everything from dinosaurs to singer Ray Charles to angels to tempestuous demons to glittering fish must have numbered in the thousands, and now they belong to the people who will be without O.L. to explain each piece with a special home-brewed tale.”

Abrams said Samuels, who was born in 1931, is survived by his wife Gladys Samuels, a brother James Broadus, two sons Ossie Jr. and wife Sheila, Willie Frank and wife Barbara. Surviving also are Ms. Samuels’ children Stephanie Lawrence, Mary Jones, Sharise Riley and husband Harold, Eddie Johnson and Malcolm Cooper, all of Jacksonville.

Abrams said Strong and Jones Funeral Home of Tallahassee is in charge of arrangements, which will be announced Monday.