Standing in Cleaveland’s Farmington, Georgia home and studio, formerly the tiny community’s general store, pool hall, and post office, looking at the twenty-one paintings meant to tell the story of Carter’s boyhood in Sumter County, Georgia, I feel everything Cleaveland means to evoke while also furthering his mission to reveal the connections we all share with, and through, the land around us. The images are sufficiently realistic to be visceral while not so hyper-realistic 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 creekbank. 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, as Cleaveland intends, stands alone. But for the show, each painting will have a QR code next to it that will, once scanned, allow the viewer to listen to Jimmy Carter read portions of An Hour Before Daylight related to, or inspirational of, the specific work they are viewing. For Cleaveland, “It's a way of paying homage. I'm no hero worshiper, 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. He wanted to get ahead environmentally of where we're at, and where we're at now sucks. And 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 in the shape they're in because he was governor. Because he chose to say, ‘We're going to do this’. And when you go down to the coast, there are islands that aren't developed because, as a governor, he worked with the people that were down there and said, ‘We want to save these things, how can we do it?’”
