Billy Roper’s paintings announce themselves. The colors are bold — deep ochres, earthy reds, the particular green-blue of a North Georgia sky before a storm — and the compositions have the confidence of someone who was never taught to be timid about a canvas. He works in acrylics and oil pastels, sometimes charcoal, sometimes combinations that shouldn’t work together but do, because Billy’s instinct for color came not from a classroom but from a lifetime of looking hard at the world around him.

What sets these works apart from decorative folk art is their insistence on meaning. Every painting in Donna’s collection carries its story on the back — handwritten by Billy himself, in his own voice, explaining what moved him to make it. To hold a Roper painting is to hold two things at once: the image and the account of the image. It is, as the title of his university retrospective put it, visual storytelling in its purest form.