Gullah Images by Jonathan Green

Author:Jonathan Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

GATHERING LIGHT IN THE GRAY CITY

The Chicago Years

Ronne Hartfield

Jonathan Green, painter, began his artistic journey in a world of color and light. His paintings reflect subjects seen, observed, remembered, suffused with sunlight: black fishermen setting their nets at dawn to escape the sun’s oncoming heat; lines of immaculate, sun-bleached bed linen, barely catching the faintest wind from the sea; women crowded into narrow church pews, replete with wide-brimmed hats and the South’s inevitable fans, crucial shade, and respite from an unremitting sun.

For Jonathan Green, light is essential to the human experience of the world. The Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz writes of this power of light, alluding to the experience of seeing as one of sense and beyond sense. In a poem entitled simply “Hay Luz / There is Light,” Paz responds to the biblical commandment “Let there be Light” with the arrist’s hunger to see beyond sight. “There is light. We neither see nor touch It. / … / I see with my fingertips / what my eyes touch” (Octavio Paz: The Collected Poems, 1957–1987, trans. Eliot Weinberger).

Jonathan Green sees with his fingertips. For Green, as for Paz, light is critical to the human experience of the world. From his memories of light and his formation in a universe where meanings and mysteries, literal and metaphoric, were lived and communicated through light and shadow, he creates paintings that are filled with the precision of personal recollection. But more, his paintings are rich with the look and feel and smell of the lowcountry. In the African American religiocultural vernacular, these paintings do more than record a certain kind of world: they testify.

In “My Soul Looks Back,” James Cone, African American theologian, locates this experience within the black logos: “Testimony is an integral part of the black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her. Although testimony is unquestionably personal, and primarily an individual story, it is also a story accessible to others in the community of faith. Indeed, the purpose of testimony is not only to strengthen an individual’s faith, but also to build a faith of the community.”

Where does this concept of testimony reside, this understanding of the individual story as inextricable from its role in weaving the collective tapestry? Drawing on the deepest sources of a solitary journey inward, it resides in the private vision of the black artist, but it is always informed by an aggregate communal history. Seeking images that express a personal sensibility, the black artist finds that his or her metaphors are necessarily rooted in, bound to, and reflective of a larger psychocultural discourse. When the African American paints, the act is at once a private risk to express an intimate, personal response to the world, and, inevitably, homage to the ancestors. Because this revisiting of the story is also a setting straight of the record, the aesthetic heritage of the

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