Swing Low, Sweet Chariot 1944

William H. Johnson’s painting, *Swing Low, Sweet Chariot*, presents a world of flattened forms and simplified shapes rendered in a palette of soft pink, yellow, blue, and green. I can almost feel Johnson stepping back, squinting, maybe tilting his head to one side as he laid down each brushstroke, figuring out where the figures would sit in this ecstatic vision. Those bright yellow dresses of the women above; did he mix that himself, that perfect warm glow? I can picture him loading his brush, pressing it to the canvas, and watching the pigment bloom. And what about the horizontal figure on the bottom, a contorted body in the midst of a split, almost leaping off the earth! Johnson’s paintings always feel like a conversation, a way of talking through images and colors to explore what it means to be human. It’s like he's saying, "Here’s a feeling, here's a story, now let's see where it takes us together."