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Jonathan Green
Southern Images of Faith, Family and Friends:
The
Art of Jonathan Green
Exhibition Introduction
Jonathan Green Biography
Jonathan Green Interview
Jonathan Green Artist's
Statement
Born in rural Gardens Corner in Beaufort County, South Carolina, on August 9, 1955, Jonathan Green is the son of Ruth Johnson Green and Melvin Green. A graduate of Beaufort High School, Green served as an Air Force illustrator before enrolling as a textile design student at the East Grand Forks Technical Institute in Minnesota. In 1978 he began his formal study of drawing and painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1982. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree by the University of South Carolina in 1996. While studying in Chicago, Green met his partner and business manager, Richard Weedman. He made it possible for Green to pursue independent study abroad to supplement his formal education. While traveling and visiting museums Green realized that "the best artists are those who paint what they know best. It took a trip to Switzerland and Mexico to return me to Gardens Corner, South Carolina, and begin my body of work 'Gullah life reflections.'"*Best known for depicting the people and landscape of the Lowcountry, Green refers to memories of local African-American traditions, as well as tales and stories told by members of his extended family and friends. The artist's paintings reflect an authentic historical understanding of Lowcountry culture, although he sometimes takes poetic license with his subject matter. Green's Lowcountry subjects may or may not be literally realistic, but they always communicate a strong sense of conceptual accuracy.
Green's mature style conveys a narrative historicity, simplicity of form and passionate energy that his many admirers have compared with African-American masters such as Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett and Romare Bearden, but might also be compared with classically modern Europeans such as Gauguin and Matisse. Green's education at The Art Institute of Chicago raised his awareness of traditions in Western and non-Western art that utilize color as a symbolic element-one of the most important stylistic aspects of his work. Green's work also subtly reflects his formal study of textile design and the contemporaneous influence of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement. Reaching maturity as an artist in the 1980s, he shared in the renewed interest in figurative painting among contemporary collectors and museums.Coming on the heels of the second of four solo traveling exhibitions, the 1996 publication of Gullah Images: The Art of Jonathan Green by the University of South Carolina Press, brought Green's work to a wider and more diverse audience. This highly successful book is now in its third printing, with sales of over 13,000 copies. The artist has been invited to give one-person exhibitions in major museums throughout the country, and is represented in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Philharmonic Center for the Arts, Naples, Florida; the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; and the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina. Green currently lives and works in Naples, Florida.
Jay Williams
Chief Curator
McKissick Museum
University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina
* Unpublished panel discussion at the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas, January 27, 2001.
The Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum
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