The painting on the easel in Julie Green’s Corvallis studio depicts a Chicago brownstone; a geyser, drawn from the image on a Transferware plate Green bought at a local antique mall; a faint amaryllis flower, a symbol of success after a long struggle; a corned beef sandwich and dill pickles; and, poignantly, the text, “Thank God I’m Home.”
Green’s painting is the eighth in a series called “First Meal.” The works pay tribute to the first meals exonerated inmates choose after being released, in some cases after decades of wrongful incarceration. Marcel Brown was freed in July 2018 after nearly a decade in prison.
“First Meal” is in some ways a companion to Green’s well-known “The Last Supper” project, which depicts the last meals death row inmates eat before their execution.
At first, Green, a professor of fine arts in the College of Liberal Arts, thought the “First Meal” would be a lighter, more joyous project. The pastoral, utopic scenes, like the geyser in Brown’s painting, are a testament to that, but contrast starkly with the text, images of food and the sheer number of years people have spent wrongfully imprisoned.
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