Farm Woman

Jonathan Green's Farm Woman

Some artists have an image in their minds and work with paint or metal or clay until they feel they’ve rendered it real. Others simply begin working and let the creation come to life as they do so. Charleston painter Jonathan Green does neither of those things.

He’s spent the past 40 years fashioning work that recreates things he saw with his own eyes as a child, or things his family experienced in past generations. He considers himself a kind of cultural educator, creating documents of a way of life, specifically the Gullah culture that resides in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia.

The paintings that Green creates, some of which are currently on display in an exhibition at the University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum called Sharing The Chores, often center around black women, surrounded by strikingly bright blue skies and grassy fields, but also by washing hanging on the line, or baskets full of grain. It’s a combination of childlike innocence and the reality that for the Gullah people in the early and mid-20th century — fleeting moments of joy sandwiched between hours of work.

‘Those were the people who did all the domestic chores,” Green says. “The people who did all the farming and the cooking. But they were also where American iconic aspects of music and dance and spirituality came from. That’s what I want people to take away from my work. They take away a culture that they never really knew existed.”

Green says that he essentially had no choice but to remember and recreate the moments depicted in his paintings. It’s part of his DNA.

“I think that there are certain people, certain children who are born with a sort of program to record information for family, for community and for culture,” he offers. “And I was just very fortunate to be one of those people. I think that’s where it all began. If you’re talking about an artist such as I am, my purpose is to record my family’s history and culture, especially having been aware through my schools and my travels that so much of my culture is not used, displayed or talked about other than from the perspective of slaves.”

The idea that many of the images we associate with black culture are filtered through the lens of slavery is one that causes Green to bristle, and it’s something that he seeks to correct with his own work.

“Those people were not slaves,” he emphasizes. “They were Africans. They had 10,000 or 20,000 years of their own culture, and they came from different parts of Africa. Slavery is a word that’s only used to denounce the existence of a culture of people. You may own someone in your own mind, but you never own one’s soul. My work is from my soul, from my heart, from my being, and it’s the opportunity to show what I saw. And what I saw is what I hardly saw anything else of in terms of the depiction of black people in America.”

It’s interesting to note that what Green also saw was an almost entirely matriarchal culture. There are few men in his paintings, and he says the reason for that is simple.

“All I saw for most of the day were women,” Green explains. “Women working together. Men worked out in the fields, or they were hunter-gatherers, or working other types of jobs. What I saw was mainly women, and that’s why so much of my work, so much of what I’ve painted, is from the perspective of women.”

From those moments in his youth watching the women of the Lowcountry working, Green never had any doubt about what he would do one day, even if he didn’t know what to call it.

“My existence is framed around the arts,” he says. “It’s all I have done for 40 years. It was all I ever wanted to do even before I heard the term ‘art.’”


What: Sharing The Chores: Works on Paper by Jonathan Green

Where: McKissick Museum, 816 Bull St.

When: Through Aug. 4

Price: Free

More: 803-777-7251, sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/mckissick_museum

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