Mr. Green Connects Reality with Imagination at Olin College Art Show

Drawing inspiration from architectural sources, Mr. Green attempts to connect reality with abstraction in his work. “I get inspired by what I see, both real and imagined,” he said. After spending seven years painting and teaching at the Parsons School of Design in Paris, Mr. Green narrowed his focus from landscape imagery to invented architectural images. “Living in the Paris suburbs, I walked past countless houses with imposing facades on my commute to Parsons. I began incorporating aspects of those many architectural ‘faces’ into a series of house ‘portraits,’” he said.

In creating his house portraits, Mr. Green enjoys the inventive freedom of combining reality-inspired architectural images with aspects of his imagination, yielding wholly fictitious houses. “With each house image, there seems to be endless possibilities of manipulating its elements to achieve evocative, psychological-like effects,” he said.
Mr. Green describes his paintings as what he calls “hybrid” houses. In these paintings, he places great emphasis on the elements of color and light. “The houses are simply vehicles to express different types of light with color and tone,” he said. Through Mr. Green’s inventive process, these expressions of color and light produce images that “stand most effectively as both Color Field semi-abstractions and as naturalistic, slightly blurry, realist studies,” Bill Scott wrote.

Though his subjects are architectural, Mr. Green describes himself as profoundly influenced by the landscape paintings of Edwin Dickinson. His first encounter with Dickinson’s paintings was at a one-man exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in the fall of 1980. Dickinson’s paintings are examples of the balance between perceptual reality and abstraction that Mr. Green admires.

“In his numerous alla prima landscape paintings, Dickinson displayed an uncanny ability to juggle his perception of reality with paint’s naturally abstract physicality,” Mr. Green said. “Viewing Dickinson’s show of small scale, visual marvels helped me define my own lifelong painterly aspiration to examine the borders between abstraction and figuration.” Dickinson’s work exemplifies what Mr. Green calls “the poetic possibilities of paint.”

Mr. Green continues to focus on the application of his paint. Through years of development as an artist, he “came to realize that a meaningful aspect of painting for [him] was ultimately the paint itself.” Noting Mr. Green’s technique, Mr. Scott said that “[the paintings’] colors hover, showing little trace of the brush.”

While in Paris, Mr. Green experimented with an ancient painting technique called “encaustic,” which involves mixing powder pigment with melted beeswax and then applying it hot to a painting support. He found this traditional encaustic technique to be too labor-intensive, so “I developed my own cold wax medium that allowed me to add cold, but softened, beeswax to my tube paint to create a smooth and translucent effect,” he said. Once a painting is finished, Mr. Green heats its surface to melt and congeal the many paint layers into one. After his paintings completely dry, Mr. Green will buff them with a chamois cloth to give them a semi-gloss finish.

“The only drawback to this painting method,” Mr. Green said, “is that I must keep a window open and a ventilation fan going to prevent paint fumes from accumulating.” As a result, he has endured hours of freezing cold in his Hackley studio.
“You can say that I either love what I do or that I am crazy!” Mr. Green said.