The colour takes it from a personal or daydreamish thing and turns it into a durable presentable thing. But so do the size and the texture. Every negative shape and positive shape is interesting. The composition, the drawings, are fine. When I made those decisions I made them knowing they were complete. The colour is a way to take the temporalness of the sketch and make it more permanent. It’s formalising the inspiration. It’s like it’s an entertainer.’
When I saw the work in Green’s studio, he first showed me five or six of the most colour saturated canvases, before he came to one of the more difficult and rewarding pleasures the show has to offer. With Sought and Wanted Green used a much more washed-out palette that emphasises the pencil line. The small rectangular fields of yellows and greens are less expository than the more vivid pieces. There are no limbs or faces serving as borders between the colours, they’re on their own, vying with the drawn figure. Here’s Green’s abstraction again beautifully integrated with story.
The colour, he explains, is part of the story of each painting, but also tells another story across a group of paintings. ‘I wanted to use some colours that seemed to me nostalgic colours, certain yellows and greens that reminded me old toys or school cafeterias. I wanted to put them next to more contemporary colours to tell a story that would sort of accordion all the years in between. There’s so much competition for colour now. Coca-Cola’s red can’t be the same red they were using 50 years ago. Computers, plastics, pigments have given us so many new colours. Colour here, the older colours and the newer ones, are telling a side-story about colour.’
Green explains that he’s starting to see his work as a kind of flexible meditation on layering--layers of story of surface, and of process, both manual and computerized. The recent show, from the sketch-movies to the finished paintings, ‘is a documentary of that density, and now Green’s turning twelve of the finished sketch-movies into prints. Stories starting how don’t end. ‘I like the computer because it keeps giving you options’, Green says. ‘What if I do this? You try it, and if you don’t like it you undo it. The original can always be resurrected. It raises the idea of working on one painting your whole life, saving it and working on it again and again.’ Not to make a finished thing, Green explains, but to learn how to become a pasha. How else do you become that, he asks, except by painting a Scheherazade that becomes a kind of pasha itself continually postponing the end with how. [end]