The first time Donna encountered a Billy Roper painting, she did what most people do — she turned it over. That’s the thing about Billy: the story lives on the back. He paints the image, rich and bold and alive with the colors of the North Georgia mountains, then sits down and writes out what it means — what he was thinking, what he was feeling, who he was when he made it. It is an act of extraordinary generosity from a man who grew up in Pickens County painting on whatever he could find, including, famously, a washing machine lid.

Billy is self-taught, which is to say he was taught by everything — by his Cherokee ancestors and their stories, by the Appalachian landscape he has never really left, by the music that has always run through his life like a current. He didn’t sell his first painting until he was 42. By then he had already been an artist for decades; the world just hadn’t caught up yet. He became North Georgia College and State University’s first artist-in-residence in 2007, and the book Billy Roper: Visual Storyteller was the first work ever published by the university press.

Donna came to know Billy not through a gallery but the way you come to know most things worth knowing in North Georgia — through people, through conversation, through the particular gravity that a genuinely rare person generates. She collects his work because it does what she has always believed the best art does: it witnesses. It says, this is what it was like to be alive in this place, among these people, during this time. Billy Roper makes paintings that are also letters to the future, and Donna has been a faithful reader for many years.