Savannah Cartography Series: Mapping the Lowcountry

Savannah has always been shaped by water. The Savannah River moves past its historic streets toward a coast threaded with tidal creeks, salt marshes, sounds, and barrier islands. Live oaks gather beneath curtains of Spanish moss. Marsh grass turns from brilliant green to burnished gold with the seasons. Oyster beds emerge with the falling tide. Beyond them, maritime forests meet dunes and the Atlantic. This landscape has sustained people for thousands of years, from Indigenous communities to the Gullah-Geechee families whose knowledge, labor, faith, foodways, and traditions remain inseparable from the cultural landscape of coastal Georgia.

The paintings honor these histories through the physical act of making.

In Ossabaw Island: Of Oceans and Oaks, the island emerges from an abstract pour of teal, deep purple, soft pink, olive green, and ochre. Paint was first allowed to flow freely across the surface, pooling, separating, and finding its own channels before the recognizable geography of Ossabaw was glazed above it. The process echoes the forces that continue to form the barrier island. Water enters and retreats. Sand migrates. Creeks divide the marsh. Shorelines disappear and rebuild. Beneath the mapped island, color remains visible like an older landscape rising through the present one. Olive recalls maritime forests and ancient live oaks. Ochre holds sand and sunlit earth. Teal follows the surrounding sounds and tidal creeks. Purple settles into shadow, wet soil, and the depth of accumulated time.

Pin Point: Pearls and Perseverance turns to the oyster as both material inspiration and metaphor. Pin Point's story is rooted in the Moon River marshes and in generations of Gullah-Geechee families who built a community through faith, kinship, inherited knowledge, and work connected intimately to the water. A luminous pour of pearl white, blush pink, lavender, blue, cream, and gold recalls the iridescent interior of an opened oyster shell. Across it, gritty impasto is scraped and built into coarse ridges inspired by the shell's weathered exterior. Light slips between these heavier passages, revealing flashes of color beneath them. The surface becomes a meditation on endurance and preservation, holding the physical memory of oyster work alongside the beauty of a culture sustained across generations.

Then there is Sweet Savannah, where the series moves from collective history into personal memory. Savannah unfolds in turquoise waterways, lavender neighborhoods, bright greens, creamy yellows, and confectionary swirls of gold, transforming the familiar city grid into something almost edible. The palette comes from a sixteen-year-old's first encounter with River Street: copper kettles glowing behind candy counters, warm pralines, toasted Georgia pecans, butter, vanilla, sugar, colorful wrappers, and the broad river just outside the door. Here, cartography becomes nostalgia. A street is no longer simply a street. It becomes the place where a scent was first noticed, a flavor was remembered, and affection for a city quietly began.

Across the series, the map provides structure while abstraction reveals what the map leaves out. Paint is poured, glazed, scraped, layered, softened, and allowed to remain imperfect. Some boundaries are precise. Others dissolve. Roads become gestures. Rivers become currents of color. Pearlescent passages catch the light while rough surfaces hold shadow. Earlier layers remain partially visible beneath later ones, much as the Savannah of the present continues to carry the people, landscapes, labor, traditions, and memories of those who came before.

The Savannah Cartography Series is ultimately a portrait of place told through many kinds of memory. It looks toward the ancient ground of Ossabaw, the oyster shells and tidal knowledge of Pin Point, the ordered streets of the Historic District, the sweetness of River Street, and the marshes that bind them all together.

These paintings do not attempt to contain Savannah. They approach it with reverence, recognizing a city and coast too layered to be understood from geography alone. A map can tell us where the river bends, where an island begins, or where one street meets another. Art can ask what happened there, who carried its stories, what colors remain in our memory, and what part of that place we continue to carry with us.