During recent changes in my house, some pictures by my friend Billy Morgan emerged. Admittedly, my artistic sensibilities are less than cutting edge, but I treasure his art more than any others. I will never understand or appreciate the picture I saw of a blob of white paint in the middle of a white canvas. But I know what I like and I like pictures of something that is something and that convey more than a snap shot of it.
Billy’s pictures do that. He described his style as “super realism.” He captures fine details, like the grain in wood, that a camera does not. The details tell stories that were the essence of his intent, stories from his life and mine.
Billy Morgan grew up in a sharecropper family, mostly around Cobbtown, home of my mother’s family and my wife’s. The life of a sharecropper is hard. Prosperity is limited to part of the profit from the year’s crops, assuming that weather, crop pests and an honest landowner make such profit possible. A lot could and did go wrong. Often, sharecroppers stayed in one place only a year or so. For them home was not a place.
As soon as Billy was old enough to help with farm work, he became part of the family labor force. Lacking art supplies, he drew on paper fertilizer bags with pencils or the charred ends of sticks. He was scolded, at best, when art interfered with work. As soon as he was old enough, he joined the Army, a frequent option for country boys whose prospects for the future ranged from discouraging to grim. His art actually flourished during his time in the military.
Afterwards, his body of work grew steadily. Most of his pictures are of farm scenes, but he painted wildlife -- deer and ducks -- as if captured in action. From life on the farm, he imprinted in memory the image of a mule and could revive one on canvas as if it were ready to step off and bray. He captured people with the same vitality in a painting about landowner and cotton pickers weighing up cotton at the end of the day. My own memory confirms that he got these scenes exactly right, down to fine details and the flow of activity.
By the time that I got to know Billy, he had a manager who helped him market his art. He sold prints at local and regional festivals and occasional meet-and-greet events. Indeed, of my collection of a half dozen works, only one is an original painting. But his health was fragile. I sort of kept up with him through a niece who was a student at Georgia Southern. He checked into the VA hospital in Dublin and that is the last that I heard about him. Life was never easy for Billy Morgan.
The only original painting in my collection reflects his sharecropper past. It focuses on a set of crude steps leading to an open door to a room. One step is partly secured by a bent nail. Two beat-up pots and a basket are scattered on the steps. Just inside the door -- apparently to a kitchen -- is a worn out broom, its image fading into the darkness of the room. He entitled the work, “Left Behind.” Another piece is of a field rather featureless except for a plow upright in the soil. He called it, “Leaving It Behind.” I understand, Billy.
I have a print of his best-known painting, “Promise Kept.” He created it around family lore. During the Civil War, a mother received a letter from her son saying that the war was lost. He promised her that he would be home soon. In the same mail delivery, she received official notification that he had been killed in action. Billy’s picture shows a worn woman with both letters before her. Barely visible outside the window in the yard is a shadowy figure in Confederate uniform mounted on a horse. Promise kept!
My personal favorite Billy print is a vertical picture of a typical farmstead. In the mid-level are the house attached to the kitchen by only a dog trot. Further to the left stands the outdoor toilet. The barn and mule lot take up the rest of the mid-level. A man plowing a garden plot with a mule occupy the left foreground. Both bear the stamp of Billy’s realism. On the right is a hog pen occupied by listed Hampshires and Duroc Jerseys like my father raised. Beyond the barn is a tobacco-curing barn equipped with Burley burners like the first non-wood-burning units that Daddy adopted. There is a pole and gourds for nests for purple martins. At the edge of a distant wood line is a deer stand.
If I were an artist with Billy Morgan’s special gift, I would try to create something like that.
Roger G. Branch Sr. is professor emeritus of sociology at Georgia Southern University and is a retired pastor.