Some stories start when another story ends with why, but a better story, a story that doesn’t end, starts with how. ‘The frustrating, arrogant times were when I tried to make a finished thing’, Elliott Green says. ‘How do you do something? How do you get there? How do you become that? I was always interested in the question.’ The answer Green found was to use the question in his paintings. ‘It turns out it’s a road movie.’
Actually, most of the works in Green’s June 2000 show at Postmasters Gallery in New York start with a sketch-movie. The paintings are of details derived either from his drawings or from an extremely slow and deliberate drawing process he started experimenting with a few years ago that once finished looks something like a digital flip-book. He draws a line, scans it into a computer with PhotoShop, and then draws another line, scans that, and another, and maybe erases another and scans that. He’s looking for something that’ll jump-start the drawing, ‘something that hits me as right, a figure, a shape’. The curve of a limb appears somewhere or the silhouette of a face. ‘Then I look for something that complements it, and maybe eventually the first line gets lost; but once I have the first line, that’s when the drama comes in.’
The completed sketch-movie is a kind of how-to story about making art. For the artist, regardless of how long it takes, the drama’s in finding what comes next; for the beholder, since the inspiration is understood to be the premise of the work itself, the moment always seems instantaneous. Here’s how to see it the way the artist does. The catch, of course, is that you’re not, and watching the action unfold just makes it stranger. The sketch-movies, taking days on the production end, last just a few seconds on the computer screen and then rewind to the first line and build again. We’re still left wondering, how did it become a finished piece of art? At what point in the process was the making graced with inspiration? If it’s a little like a magician pulling the rabbit out of his hat again and again without ever giving it away, it’s worth keeping in mind that the rabbit’s just one part of a story that happens to have a rabbit in it. It’s a how-to story, but not about a finished thing, nor the intimation of a single moment.
‘I remember seeing this Picasso drawing of a horse where he had erased a couple of legs and redrawn them’, Green explains. ‘It really gave the drawing movement--not just physical movement, but phantom movement. The thing moved intellectually. If a form isn’t right, if it’s erased, the correction has meaning. It’s the process of the mind, next »