He began making art as a child, surrounding the porch of his parents' house with hand-carved wooden dolls and drawing in the dirt or on tree trunks outside.
[1] As his talents became known in the community he began collecting pigments from earth, rocks plants, foodstuffs, and industrial products for use in his finger paintings.
[2] A 1971 exhibition in his home town of Fayette earned regional attention and, beginning that year, he became a featured artist at the annual Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, Alabama.
He drew his subject matter from the world around him: people he knew (and celebrities), architecture, farm scenes, machinery, flowers, and animals of the woods and barnyard.
As his fame grew, dealers advised Sudduth on ways to make his works more permanent and more colorful, and by the 1990s, no longer able to collect his own materials, he began using commercially-sold acrylic paints, applied with sponge brushes onto wood panels prepared with a flat black ground.