How the Rural Landscapes of Jimmy Carter’s Youth Inspired a Georgia Artist

John Cleaveland never meant to be an artist when he left Jacksonville, Florida in 1980. He planned to study forestry at the University of Georgia, which, for a self-described “total redneck [who] loved the woods and being outside,” made sense. But when Cleaveland arrived, Athens, Georgia, was experiencing an intoxicating moment. The B-52s were touring the nation after their cocktail-fueled birth during a 1976 jam session. R.E.M. was playing house parties, still three years away from their debut album, Murmur. The first Georgian to lead the nation was in his last few months in the Oval Office. Things were in motion, a gentle riot of light and color and sound.

Cleaveland immersed himself in this Athens of ramshackle rental houses redolent of cheap beer and dance-fueled sweat, of artists who rode a creative flood into the formerly quiet, quirky town, seeking cheap living and inspiration. After a few semesters spent thinking about pine forest basal layers and the application of fire to the Southern landscape, Cleaveland took an art appreciation class of his own, one for non-art majors taught by a sculptor named Bill Squires. Squires allowed his two hundred students to either write an essay or fill a sketchbook. Troubled by dyslexia, Cleaveland filled two. When he returned them, Squires said, “I need to talk to you.” Eventually dissuaded of the notion that Cleaveland was an art student padding his GPA, Squires said, “You know, John, I have never had anybody turn in anything like this. You should take some drawing classes. You’ve got some talent.”

Turning away from forestry, Cleaveland set his sights on becoming a graphic designer. There was only one problem: “I couldn’t get into graphic design school.” But Cleaveland was beginning to understand that life is not linear and that one should often listen to what the landscape is telling you. “One of my teachers was Herb Creasy, a wild man abstract expressionist. I was in his color theory class, and he heard me talking about getting rejected and said, ‘Cleaveland, they don’t want you in that f*cking school. You can’t follow directions for shit. You never do what the project’s supposed to be. But that’s not a bad thing. You should take my painting class next quarter.’ And the first day of his class, it was like, ‘Oh, here’s what I’m good at!’” 

What Cleaveland is good at has evolved over the intervening four decades, leaving a legacy of paintings on permanent display in such fine art institutions as the Asheville Art Museum, the National Museum of the Marine Corps, and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia. His landscapes also hang in private and corporate art collections, including those of the 3M Company, Bessemer Trust, and the Alabama Power Company.

But the work and place that may best explain Cleaveland is a pair of four-by-eight-foot landscapes, expansive contemplations of the Broad River and a Georgia hillside respectively, hanging in the University of Georgia’s State Botanical Garden. Cleaveland’s pieces there reflect his artistic purpose. “My point has been—since I was twenty-six and finally found what I was supposed to paint, landscapes in Georgia—to find the beauty in the common, in what’s around me, and in what’s worth paying attention to. I’m evoking home. I’m evoking slow. I’m evoking nature. They’re all connected.” 

Starting December 14, those connections can be found at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, in The Nature of the Man: Landscapes from the Childhood of Jimmy Carter, a new show of Cleaveland’s work timed to coincide with the former president’s hundredth birthday. Standing in Cleaveland’s Farmington, Georgia, home and studio—formerly a general store, gas station, pool hall, and post office—looking at the twenty-one paintings meant to tell the story of Carter’s boyhood in Sumter County, I feel everything Cleaveland means to evoke. The images are sufficiently realistic to be genuinely visceral while not so hyperrealistic as to feel cold or calculated. His work is alive. I hear the water in the creek. I feel the barefoot chill of sand on a Georgia creek bank. I smell freshly turned dirt on the breeze giving life to the curtains in a farmhouse window. They are things I know, things I have lived. 

The work stands alone. But for the show, each painting will have a QR code next to it that viewers can scan to listen to Carter read portions of his celebrated 2001 memoir, An Hour Before Daylight, that relate to the specific work before them. For Cleaveland, “It’s a way of paying homage. I’m no hero worshipper, but as far as people who are up on a plane of what they’ve done with their life and the stands they’ve made that are admirable, Jimmy’s a North Star.” Environmentally, he continues, “if we had been doing some of the things he wanted and knew we needed to do, we’d be in a better place. Talk about somebody with foresight; Georgia’s rivers are [as healthy as they are] because he was governor. And when you go down to the coast, there are islands that aren’t developed because, as a governor, he said, ‘We want to save these things, how can we do it?’”

As much as The Nature of the Man honors Carter, the show is also intensely personal. Cleaveland’s son Atticus, a kind boy on the precipice of manhood and deeply focused on the environmental state of the South, took his own life on November 4, 2020. Cleaveland wears the pain of that loss just beneath the surface of a face deeply lined by years and elements. Ask him how much of the show is about Atticus, the son with whom Cleaveland read An Hour Before Daylight multiple times, and tears spring from closed eyes and he answers, choked through a fist-covered mouth, “All of it.”

If the show’s paintings express Carter’s love of the land, they speak wordless volumes about Cleaveland’s love for his child and the land through which they are still connected. Even more pointedly, it celebrates the connection with Atticus that Cleaveland built through Carter’s story. As Cleaveland says, “This beautiful man, he’s talking about growing up in this hard place, but he loves it so. You get in the book that his father was not an emotional man, and Jimmy just worshiped the ground he walked on. And that’s why, when his father was dying, he came back to Plains and changed his trajectory in life, realizing ‘I’m needed here in this community.’ 

“I read that book when Atticus was little, about Jimmy Carter growing up in this place that didn’t exist anymore, and I cried at parts of it. I’ve got a photograph of Atticus down there in Plains the last time Jimmy taught Sunday school. Atticus got to hear him. I thought that it was a great gift. And then a couple of years ago, I thought, ‘I have all these images from the times I read that book.’ A lot of people don’t have a visual image of what Jimmy is saying to them about standing in this creek, fishing with his father with a stringer tied to his belt loop. They don’t know what that feels like. They don’t even know what the place would look like.” 

Now they can experience it at The Nature of the Man, which will run through March 31, 2025. A reception open to the public will be held at 4:00 pm on December 14, the first day of the show, and along with an artist’s talk, will include, “food that is pure hospitality, stuff you might find on the table at the church,” Cleaveland says. And in a nod to Carter’s legacy, “Paper plates and metal flatware, no single-use plastics, because let’s be hospitable—but also be conscious of what we’re doing.”

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