Meeting with Georgia Governor to lend him some art for his walls.

The Georgia Council for the Arts asked me to lend a painting to hang in Georgia Governor Nathan Deal's office through September. Here's the photo opp:

This loan is part of the Ga. Council's program The Art of Georgia II: Portraits of a Community "seeking to capture the uniqueness of communities throughout Georgia as seen, explored, and depicted through the artist’s eye."

This painting "In the Valley of the Little Tennessee,"  was painted on an early spring morning in the North Georgia Mountains well before leaf-out. I have stood in a parking lot in the small village of Dillard and painted the world as it was creating itself out of shadow and mist - as pure and simple a form of revelation as one could ever hope for.

In this painting, as in every other, I paint what I see - both the visible and the invisible in it. And what I see here is change - the morning coming and going, the day, the seasons, people, cultures. They all come and go, but these mountains and valleys and clouds remain. For thousands of years Mississipians tended this valley, then for centuries the Cherokees. Then the Scotch Irish, and today the fields here about are fast being replaced with RV parks, mobile home developments and shopping malls. But if we look deeper, the bone and marrow of what is are still here, and always have been - the mountains, the valley, the sky, the light and the dark.