Complements

Some years ago, I saw paintings by Darrell Loy Scott at a friend's now-defunct gallery in New Orleans.  Already a collector of folk art, much of it by African American painters, I asked about the artist.  "Oh, he's white," my friend said.  "A carpenter who paints.  He says he paints characters with black skin because he likes the way the color looks."  I liked the way the color looked, too, and after some thinking and much ogling over weeks, I finally bought one for myself: The Dollmaker.

 Saturday, I saw a show by Jonathan Green at Sewanee's new archives building.  Green is a well known and highly respected African American artist from South Carolina, raised in the Gullah community.  His wildly colorful images are so blindingly hypnotic that they seem to dance and sing a call-and-response.  These are lithographs I cannot afford, but ones I wish I could.

How, I wonder, did two men -- one white and one black, one a native Californian and one a South Carolinian, one a decade older than the other -- come to make such complementary pictures?  Coincidence?  I don't know.

I know only that the Green paintings I saw Saturday and the Scott painting hanging behind me now both make me wanna jump and shout.