Art Green (artist)

Last updated
Art Green
Born (1941-05-13) May 13, 1941 (age 83)
Frankfort, Indiana, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Education School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Known for Painter
Movement Chicago Imagism
SpouseNatalie Novotny (d. 2020)

Arthur Green (born May 13, 1941) was one of the original Hairy Who members from Chicago, a group of students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited together in the 1960s and 1970s and made representational art with a slight surrealist touch. [1] He was also a member of the University of Waterloo's faculty for over 30 years. [2] His painting style mixes pop-art motifs with surrealist tendencies. [3] His upbringing in Chicago and its vicinity may have influenced him, from the accessibility of the Art Institute of Chicago to the architecture of Louis Sullivan, but he also may have been influenced by advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s that had undertones of sexuality. [2] His paintings drew from American popular imagery, but complicated it, often using the full spectrum of vibrant colors and combining trompe l'oeil effects to play with the viewer's sense of balance. [4]

Contents

Biography

Green was born in Frankfort, Indiana. His father was a civil engineer who designed bridges; his mother crafted quilts and grew flowers. [5] Green initially set out to be a car designer, though he switched gears to graphic design when he started at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. [2] However, during his first year he had trouble finding enough graphic design classes to take, so he switched his focus once again to painting. [2] In 1965, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Green first came to prominence in 1966, when he joined five other recent Art Institute graduates for the first of a series of group exhibitions called The Hairy Who at a series of shows at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center. [6] The strange name reflected the trend in monikers for rock groups of the time. The other members of the group were James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. [5] Their work was known for its coarseness and vulgarity. It stood in contrast to the sleek and urban work by Manhattan artists at the time, namely Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist.

Between 1966 and 1967 Green worked at various Chicago public schools teaching seventh grade art. Between 1967 and 1968 he worked at Chicago City College as an Instructor. Green taught basic design, interior design, and art history. The following year he moved to Kendall College of Art and Design, Evanston, Illinois, to assume a position as the Chair of the Fine Arts Department. There he taught studio and art history courses. In 1969, Green married Natalie Novotny (also a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago), whose Art Institute education in pattern and fabric design became a strong influence on his work. He also accepted a teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University as an assistant professor.

Finally, in 1975, he received a Canada Council bursary, which enabled him to teach painting and drawing at the University of British Columbia. In 1976, he moved to Stratford, Ontario to teach at the University of Waterloo. While at UW, he served two terms as Chair of the Fine Arts Department; 1988–1991 and 2000–2002. He has been living in Canada ever since with two children, Catherine and Nicholas.

In 2005, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery hosted Heavy Weather: Art Green Retrospective in collaboration with the University of Waterloo Art Gallery. [5] This exhibition brought together 50 of Green's pieces, loaned from the artist and several private and public collectors in the United States and Canada, as a comprehensive survey of his 40-year career. Gary Michael Dault created a soft cover book with the same Heavy Weather title. [7] The book contains photographs of the 50 pieces, commentary, and resource images which had inspired Green.

In 2006, the University of Waterloo gave him emeritus status.

Artistic style

Green's style falls somewhere between surrealism and pop art, with hints of op art. [5] Two of his major influences, both in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, are René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. [8] He sought to capture the straightforwardness and mystery evoked in these surrealist's paintings. [5] Sometimes, he even directly quoted them, using curtains and multi point perspectives to describe architectural elements. [9] He also enjoyed the work of James Rosenquist, whose work was more about surface than substance; however, Green's objects appear to have a psychological rather than just a visual presence. [5]

The imagery Green has used throughout his entire career, and continues to use to this day, is drawn from illustrated textbooks and advertising of the forties and fifties that touch on technological and roadside Americana, with overt themes of sexual symbolism. [10] Imagery includes ice cream cones, bridges, incomplete bridges, mirrors, scissors, women's painted fingernails, passionate couples, tires, moons floating over water, puzzle pieces, silhouettes of a plane flying overhead, searchlights, tornados, women's nylon-covered legs, wood grain, leather cords, screws, cables, knots, zippers, tapes, stitches, Necker cubes, and other optical illusions. [2] The paintings tend to have torn or stitched imagery that evokes the trompe l'oeil tradition; transparent and solid planes overlap, too, achieving a high level of spatial complexity. [11] Though the illusory depth of his paintings is not all that deep, the viewer still finds himself looking at, into, and through his paintings.

Green's artwork is full of dichotomies. He has a keen interest in examining our relationship to reality, or, more specifically, the difference between looking and seeing and the rewards of the latter. He combines order and chaos, but every force is balanced and contained. [12] This order calms the chaos in time; the viewer is rewarded for spending time with his canvases as hidden objects reveal themselves in an endless tension between rationalism and irrationalism. [3]

1960s

Green's initial forays into art making closely resembled the Abstract Expressionist tradition, like most artists born around his time. [5] However, he eventually stumbled upon a book on Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical period and quickly changed his style. [5] He suddenly became interested in the absurdity of everyday life and betwixt by a dream world created in modern-day advertising. [5] His turn towards surrealism at this juncture made absolute sense to him. [5]

Art Green was one of the original six members of the Hairy Who. This was a group of artists who studied together at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later exhibited together six times in the 1960s. Their first show was at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in 1966; subsequently, they exhibited twice more at the Hyde Park Art Center, once at the San Francisco Art Institute, once at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., and once at the Visual Arts Gallery in New York. [13] Though their primary interest in exhibiting together stemmed from the fact that they were all friends and colleagues, there are stylistic similarities in their artwork. All of these artists' work have tendencies towards a cartoon style or pop art; there is a high degree of visual resolution in their drawings and paintings and a sense of horror vacui fills their canvases. [13]

1970s

By the 1970s, Green had become increasingly interested in trompe l'oeil effects on his canvas. [3] His paintings increasingly made use of a tape motif, which gave surface texture a pictorial representation; it's almost as if there is a picture within a picture in these paintings. [11] [12] An erotic nostalgia pervades his mixed up and overlapping still lifes, as he combines fragments of contemporary life into highly stylized and symmetric patterns. His paintings take on a prism-like appearance as he reinterpreted familiar images. Increasingly so, he turns away from the figure and focuses only on cropped views of fingernails and hands. [4]

1980s

In the mid-1980s, Green was interested in the Necker Cube. [2] He wrote, "I was intrigued by the possibilities of simultaneously representing all sides of a rotating cube. I incorporated tiling patterns of unfolded cubes along with the hypercube in my work." His interest in illusion extended off of the canvas and actually began affecting the shape of the canvas itself by the 1980s. [14] The canvases, too, appeared to be constructed from individual pieces of polished glass; his paintings became monuments to a secular campy artificiality. [15] Nothing was quite as it seemed in these canvases, where Green was more interested in disrupting the narrative via a manipulation of both form - i.e. he uses shaped canvas - and content - i.e. the scenes within his paintings appear cropped, giving only sensuous and flickering views of a hidden tale. [15]

1990s & 2000s

Of his more recent work, Green wrote, "I have been trying to make layered paintings that take a long time to "see". I want to encourage the viewer to be conscious of the (usually unconscious) process of the interpretation and construction of images in the mind." He has continued making use of shaped canvas and a visual complexity of his handling of paint that closely resembles a kaleidoscope. [2] To this day, he has continued to use the same motifs of a flickering flame, wood paneling, ice cream cone, woman's fingernail, etc. [16]

Noteworthy pieces

Collections

Green's paintings are in many public collections including:

Honors

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albert Bierstadt</span> German-American landscape painter (1830–1902)

Albert Bierstadt was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Harnett</span> American painter

William Michael Harnett was an American painter known for his trompe-l'œil still lifes of ordinary objects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homer Watson</span> Canadian landscape painter (1855-1936)

Homer Ransford Watson was a Canadian landscape painter. He has been characterized as the painter who first painted Canada as Canada, rather than as a pastiche of European painting. He was a member and president (1918–1922) of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, as well as a founding member and first president (1907–1911) of the Canadian Art Club. Although Watson had almost no formal training, by the mid-1920s he was well known and admired by Canadian collectors and critics, his rural landscape paintings making him one of the central figures in Canadian art from the 1880s until the First World War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis-Léopold Boilly</span> French painter and draftsman (1761–1845)

Louis-Léopold Boilly was a French painter and draftsman. A creator of popular portrait paintings, he also produced a vast number of genre paintings documenting French middle-class social life. His life and work spanned the eras of monarchical France, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Empire, the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy. His 1800 painting Un Trompe-l'œil introduced the term trompe-l'œil, applied to the technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions, though the "unnamed" technique itself had existed in Greek and Roman times.

The Blue Period comprises the works produced by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso between 1901 and 1904. During this time, Picasso painted essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. These sombre works, inspired by Spain and painted in Barcelona and Paris, are now some of his most popular works, although he had difficulty selling them at the time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ellsworth Kelly</span> American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.

William Ronald Smith, known professionally as William Ronald, was an important Canadian painter, best known as the founder of the influential Canadian abstract art group Painters Eleven in 1953 and for his abstract expressionist "central image" paintings. He was the older brother of painter John Meredith (1933–2000).

Karl Wirsum was an American artist. He was a member of the Chicago artistic group The Hairy Who, and helped set the foundation for Chicago's art scene in the 1970s. Although he was primarily a painter, he also worked with prints, sculpture, and even digital art.

<i>Haystacks</i> (Monet series) 1890–91 series of paintings by Claude Monet

Haystacks is the common English title for a series of impressionist paintings by Claude Monet. The principal subject of each painting in the series is stacks of harvested wheat. The title refers primarily to a twenty-five canvas series which Monet began near the end of the summer of 1890 and continued through the following spring, though Monet also produced five earlier paintings using this same stack subject. A precursor to the series is the 1884 Haystack Near Giverny.

Allan D'Arcangelo was an American artist and printmaker, best known for his paintings of highways and road signs that border on pop art and minimalism, precisionism and hard-edge painting, and also surrealism. His subject matter is distinctly American and evokes, at times, a cautious outlook on the future of this country.

Joe Goode, is an American visual artist, known for his pop art paintings. Goode made a name for himself in Los Angeles, California, through his cloud imagery and milk bottle paintings which were associated with the Pop Art movement. The artist is also closely associated with Light and Space, a West Coast art movement of the early 1960s. He resides in Los Angeles, California.

The Chicago Imagists are a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Feeley</span> American artist

Paul Feeley was an artist and director of the Art Department at Bennington College during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Andrew Bucci was an American artist from Mississippi.

Gladys M. Nilsson is an American artist, and one of the original Hairy Who Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists active during the 1960s and 1970s. She is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Jim Nutt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tony Urquhart</span> Canadian painter (1934–2022)

Anthony Morse Urquhart, LL.D. was a Canadian painter. He was recognized in the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of Canada's pioneering abstractionists, having been variously linked with the Toronto painters associated with The Isaacs Gallery and The Heart of London group that included Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe and Murray Favro.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Klamen</span> American painter

David Klamen is an American artist and academic. He is known for visually diverse paintings that meld technical mastery with postmodern explorations of the processes by which humans understand and interpret experience. Klamen has exhibited across the United States, Europe and Asia, including individual shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), the Chazen Museum of Art and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, and major group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Crocker Art Museum. His work sits in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Klamen has been based in Chicago for most of his career, which includes being an educator for over thirty years, primarily at Indiana University Northwest, where he was appointed Founding Dean, School of the Arts in 2018.

Richard Shaw is an American ceramicist and professor known for his trompe-l'œil style. A term often associated with paintings, referring to the illusion that a two-dimensional surface is three-dimensional. In Shaw's work, it refers to his replication of everyday objects in porcelain. He then glazes these components and groups them in unexpected and even jarring combinations. Interested in how objects can reflect a person or identity, Shaw poses questions regarding the relationship between appearances and reality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Greg Drasler</span> American painter

Greg Drasler is an American artist known for metaphorical paintings that mix vernacular imagery and decoration and visual and interpretive conundrums. His work explores the construction of identity and memory through painted subjects that range from elaborately constructed interiors to symbolic common objects to patterned panoramas of the American highway. Although representational, Drasler's work eludes defined aesthetic categories such as realism, incorporating elements of surrealism, abstraction, and postmodern bricolage and recontextualization. In an early Art in America review, Robert G. Edelman wrote that Drasler "shares with Magritte the ability to create images that are both convincing and profoundly disorienting"; Jonathan Goodman described his later paintings as enigmatic puzzles meant to be meditated on, as both "visual metaphors for self" and formal statements existing for the sake of psychological mystery. Drasler has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has been shown at the New Museum, PS1, Whitney Museum Stamford, Artists Space and Carnegie Museum of Art, and reviewed or featured in Art in America, Flash Art, New Art Examiner, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. Drasler lives in Tribeca, New York City with his wife, artist Nancy Davidson, and teaches at Pratt Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Hall (Canadian artist)</span> Canadian modernist painter from Alberta (born 1943)

John Hall is a Canadian modernist painter from Alberta, known for his highly realistic painting style.

References

  1. ↑ Loos, Ted (April 3, 2017). "Chicago to Take the Spotlight With Ambitious 2018 Art Event". New York Times. Retrieved 30 May 2017.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Art Green: Certain Subjects. New York: Garth Greenan Gallery. 2013. ISBN   9780989890212.
  3. 1 2 3 Gruber, Terry (1977). "Art Green". Arts Magazine. 51 (9): 16.
  4. 1 2 Applegate, Judith (1970). "Paris Letter". Art International. 14 (5): 65.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Enright, Robert (2005). "Green's Party". Border Crossings. 24 (4).
  6. ↑ Halstead, Whitney (1966). "Chicago". Artforum. 4 (10): 56.
  7. ↑ Heavy Weather: Art Green Retrospective. Kitchener: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. 2005. ISBN   0973818018.
  8. ↑ Schulze, Franz (1966). "Chicago Popcycle". Art in America. 54 (6): 103.
  9. ↑ Halstead, Whitney (1967). "Chicago". Artforum. 5 (9): 66.
  10. ↑ Urquhart, Jane (1979). "Waterloo: Art Green". ArtsCanada (226/227): 64.
  11. 1 2 Adrian, Dennis (1974). "Chicago: Art Green at Phyllis Kind". Art in America. 62 (4): 91–92.
  12. 1 2 Frank, Peter (1977). "Art Green". Art News. 76 (3): 144.
  13. 1 2 Johnson, Ken (February 27, 2009). "Art in Review: Art Green". The New York Times. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  14. ↑ Argy, Andy (1986). "Art Green". New Art Examiner. 13 (8): 53–54.
  15. 1 2 Moser, Charlotte (1986). "Art Green". Art News. 85 (4): 142–143.
  16. ↑ Glatt, Cara (August 18, 1999). "Hairy Who gets up close and personal". Hyde Park Herald: 10.
  17. ↑ "Delicate Situation - Online Collection". Akron Art Museum. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  18. ↑ "Search Collections Results". The Art Institute of Chicago. The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  19. ↑ "Valparaiso Poetry Review". Valparaiso University. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  20. ↑ "Search". Canada Council Art Bank. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  21. ↑ "Green, Art, Conflicting Evidence, 1974". Dalhousie Art Gallery. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  22. ↑ "Collections". Smart Museum of Art. University of Chicago. Retrieved 31 May 2017.[ permanent dead link ]
  23. ↑ "Thin Ice". mumok. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  24. ↑ "Collection: Art Green, Rigorous Timidity, 1970". MCA. MCA Chicago. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  25. ↑ "Collection Search Results". NGA. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  26. ↑ "The Collection". PAFA. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  27. ↑ "Pure Fabrication by Art Green". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  28. ↑ "Face Value". Yale University Art Gallery. Yale University. Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  29. ↑ "Members since 1880". Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Archived from the original on 26 May 2011. Retrieved 11 September 2013.

Bibliography

General references

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.