Conversation with Elliott Green

Published in Figure/Ground Magazine

Elliott Green was interviewed by Suzanne Unrein. October 16, 2019

Elliott Green was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960 and has been making paintings in New York since 1981.

After spending a year in Rome in 2012, his work developed a new sense of space and landscape, characterized by panoramic, far-reaching vistas, and geophysical features like mountains, reservoirs and skies that seem to melt impossibly into pure gesture. In his recent work, the conventions of landscape are upended to produce a visual experience of equal parts gestural energy, emotion, memory, and metaphor.

Green currently has a solo exhibition at the Pierogi Gallery, NYC and has had numerous past solo exhibits in NYC at the Pierogi Gallery, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Postmasters and Hirschl & Adler Modern.  Other solo shows include The Center for Visual Art + Culture, University of Connecticut, the Krannert Art Museum, I-Space, The University of Illinois, Chicago, IL among others.  He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2005 & 2018 and the Jules Guerin Rome Prize in 2011.  He lives and works in Athens, NY.

Photo credit by Tim Thayer

Your earlier work was very much about drawing.  Do you use drawing in these current landscapes? Do you start by drawing out the structure? 

I do. But instead of a pencil, I use graphite paint and a pointed brush and my fingers, making a variety of marks directly on the fresh canvas. It’s like a warm-up exercise. I begin without plans and with an open mind. There’s a lot of wiping away, which is really easy at that point. I make big sweeping gestures, with a freedom of flow, and just being there without anticipating anything, let alone how it ends. Then, almost effortlessly, this process of improvisation gives birth to a sinuous compositional structure and a theme of shapes. Whatever I end up finally doing clings to that established pathway. The essence of the painting is born there and remains in the shadows. It occurred to me recently that maybe I had conditioned myself, having been hunched over a drawing table for decades, to relax into a moving sleep-state at the sight and feel of graphite, because when I do it standing in front of the canvas, I’m able to float along in a stream of consciousness.

So you have this overall non-structure and then you go into it with the paint? 

The wet sketching sets a tone. The more abstract, the better, and the more the gestures span the width and length of the canvas, the better. Then I modify it, adding something sky-like and markings of ascending scale, and it adapts into something more scenic. It’s best for this type of painting to start with small elements at the top of the picture and move downward, overlapping with successively larger shapes, and moving across laterally, usually. But even these basic rules can be undermined, and I do that wherever possible. Then I make adjustments for balance and dynamics later. Deciding on the finishing touches takes the most deliberation and mental energy.

Do you bounce around or are you traveling through it from one end to another like a journey?

My friend, Gary Lucidon, wrote in my new book something to this effect – that there aren’t any figures in the paintings — instead there’s the journey of the artist and materials. The hand and the paint move across the canvas, searching and making connections between sections until the surface has been fully explored and mapped.  The viewer’s journeying happens when his eyes follow the large gestures that circulate through the terrain and atmosphere. Along the way, the viewer can stop to focus on smaller abstractly painted zones niched within the larger framework. When the painting is finished, I become a viewer too, and We the viewers are like bodiless spirits gliding through the space and riding its airstreams. There’s a flowing undercurrent that transports you around.

Dirty Gravity, 2019, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

Let’s talk about your earlier work.  In the last few years that you were living in the city you were making drawings of figures that were very crowded together.  How did you end up going from those images to these?  What were you thinking back then?

I didn’t know then how much I’m affected by my environment. In my studio in Tribeca, I believed that I was constructing a pictorial language of behaviors and personality types acting out relationships, like in a play at the theater. But I was just echoing the humanity that was around me. When I moved upstate, away from the dense population, the people morphed into abstracted shapes that evoked characters – roundish and friendly or sharp and guarded or just standoffish. Then they became surrounded by a little more space and pockets of light blue air or sky. They were still very concentrated with tight layers, but that decompression relaxed immediately with the first landscape.

Crowd Drawing, 2003, pencil on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches

What are these drawings or are they paintings on paper?

I used to love the satisfying feeling of pressure and release that you get making a tapered line, and then rubbing it for instant shadows. Now, as I said, I begin each painting with a mixture of graphite powder and oil paint that I combine, and don’t feel any need to draw with pencil on paper. Anyway, these are drawings. Most were left unfinished or unappreciated. They are between 12-and 30-years-old.  Just this last year I found a way to work over them by putting oil paint on top and leaving certain areas of the pencil underneath to poke through. I take the graduated color on the palette that’s left over from making my painting. I comb away some paint and then put the paper face down on it and press down. It’s basically a monotype. Hopefully the best parts will be visible and the parts I like less will be covered. Then, if I think it needs it, I add on top of that with more leftover paint, usually grabbed with a putty knife from the other palette of tube squeezed dollops. Complex and unpredictable things happen in this way. You get rich marbled slathers with deep color blendings. Impossible to plan and easy to look at.  The drawings, like a diary, retain the psychological and emotional moments from earlier stages in my life. But now I’ve brought my older self into them, and that gives them wholeness and balance. They benefit from my years of experience. I’ve partnered with my younger self, and we seem to get along.

These are cool.  Do you think you are going to do something with them in terms of painting?

Right now, it’s just a parallel project, but something from these might be seeping back into my larger work, like reverb from an amplifier. But I can’t say how it will turn out, or what, if any of this, would enter the landscapes. I first began to break down my figures into abstract parts in these drawings from 2005 to 2007. Here I was using the sulci pattern of brains, squeezing and stretching them into all different malleable shapes, as if it was modeling clay or clumps of macaroni. fMRI scans were just beginning to map the brain, and that was fascinating to learn about. These figures transitioned into abstraction when I moved out here. I did so many hands and feet when I was in the city, and now I have no desire to put people in my work anymore. I’ve totally lost interest in depicting the outward appearance of people.

Pressing Man, 2006, oil paint on pencil on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches

Did you ever go back before and look at these drawings and decide to use them or part of them in a painting?

No. it doesn’t work for me to consciously prescribe subject matter. If I consciously interject even the best conceived element or idea – it always fails. Feels clumsy, belabored, and obvious. I’m not aware of what I’m doing most of the time, and that seems to get the best results.

That’s so refreshing!  Interestingly when you were living in the city that you were not only doing figures but they were fighting for space in your compositions.  Now you are doing landscapes and they are very expansive. 

Yeah, my drawings got really overcrowded, like the dense plant roots in an undersized pot. I just had to get out of there. That was 2004, around the same time my parents died. The cast of characters that emerged in the drawings was an inventory of all the people I knew way back when — elementary school teachers, my parents’ friends, my friend’s parents. And hundreds of strangers, and famous actors too. Thousands of characters, and curiously, all of them different. They would arrive on the page totally without my anticipating them. My unconscious brought them to me. The pencil moved right, left or straight ahead. Kind of like the way an ant seeks new food sources – walking left or right or straight, sniffing scents.  My hand made millions of micro-decisions, and suddenly a familiar face would appear. Suddenly there’s our old family pediatrician! To me that’s the most fun thing in the world.  What was I was thinking about? I wasn’t thinking about anything, but crafted memory – subject matter and symbols-are coming purely out of the personal system. It’s amazing!  And it was definitely therapeutic. I needed some way to sum up my life’s events and influences at that crucial point in time.

Sure, if you had to give a reason for why you were painting this or that would you have done those things? Maybe it would have stopped you from exploring what came out of you. 

 My early work was very intimate and honest, and a lot of it was kind of embarrassing, sometimes obnoxious, frankly. If an idea came up, I drew it. I didn’t censor myself, because discovering deeply stored unconscious feelings and truths was my main objective. It was cathartic! And If I had to explain or defend myself to a lot of people, say in an art school crit, I would have had to be more self-protective and self-editing. And if I inhibited myself, I would have robbed myself of the motivation and would have stopped making my pictures, period.

Since you didn’t go to school for painting, how did that evolve into you starting to paint?

I was studying literature. I thought I wanted to be a writer, and during this one lecture course dedicated exclusively to Henry James, I started drawing in my notebooks. The drawings took up more and more space on the page, and soon became even more alluring and revealing to me than the words. Then I began to take art history courses. Mostly I liked art of the late 19th and 20th century. Stuff before that really didn’t appeal to me. I liked German Expressionism.

Me too!  Who were you interested in the most?

Kirschner.  Max Beckmann.

Did you like Otto Dix?  Some of your earlier figurative works remind me of some of his drawings. 

Yes. and Georg Grosz.

Oh yes. I can see that. 

Yes, so I guess coming from literature, I wanted to express those characterizations. To show them was so much more effective, rather than to describe them in words.

The Red Jello Steps, oil on canvas, 18 x 14 inches

And you’ve spoken about these different abstract forms in your current work as being characters.  When you have one mass of abstraction butting up against another do you see those as two groups of characters?

Yeah. They are like personality zones. The behavior of organisms in the Arctic are of course different than in the equatorial jungle or the desert, right? The abstractions show different temperaments, but share the same atmosphere, the same light, and airspace.

Do you ever set out to make a painting that’s joyful or sad or tumultuous or?

No, but I probably try to balance it out. I would say to myself, that painting’s too happy. Yeah, okay. It needs a little pain and darkness there. The complete self I’d like to portray has that depth and range of experience. It needs to be balanced, with ups and downs, like life.

You’ve mentioned you often don’t know why you are doing what you are doing.  Do you like contemplating what you’ve done later on or do you keep moving forward without reflecting on the past work? 

Here’s a good example of doing and having faith. Over many years my figures had swollen hands and feet, and I couldn’t have told you exactly why. Then I learned about ten years ago that when a person is confronted with a threat that they have three choices – fight, flight, or freeze. In milliseconds, large quantities of blood flush into the hands and feet to maximize speed and force. I was showing what I was feeling without knowing it. And then also there were times when I’ve looked at some period of work and thought, Oh, yeah, I guess I was having a hard time. About six years ago I was making these very dark-black graphite paintings, and some people were asking if I was depressed, and I said, no, I feel fine. But later, I realized I must have been depressed after all. Because those heavy paintings were made not too long before my divorce, which I didn’t consciously anticipate.  But I don’t know. I get so involved with what I’m doing that I’m not sure. I’m a strange combination of oblivious and astute.

Do you see a big difference in what your younger self was doing compared to your older self? 

 I think mostly my younger self was trying to figure out what was going on inside me, and now I’m trying to maybe see what’s going on outside of me.

That’s interesting. What year did you start with the landscapes?

In January of 2012 in Rome.

What happened at that time?

I was in Sicily at this site called Segesta, where there is a Roman temple still in excellent condition.  And from this high vantage point you can see an array of stunning elements – the Mediterranean, various farmlands where lines made by rows that were plowed by oxen for centuries enhance the perspective. Olive trees gripping rock at higher elevations.  I looked out and there was so much beautiful distance and depth in this particular vista, I thought: Wow, if I could bring this expansive feeling into a painting, it would be incredible. It seemed like just a fleeting thought. Because I had no idea how I would manage it, and I never thought of making landscapes, because there seemed to be enough of them already. I knew for certain that I wasn’t going to be making plein air paintings.  But I was just awed to see so much, and so much evidence of time having happened, right there, all at once. That’s why those temples were built up high – so you could see for miles and miles and know the awe. That panorama was so open and viscerally moving. Being cooped up for so much of my life in studios might have made that experience seem especially sensational.

When you are painting something do you believe it is coming from you or something else?  It seems very intuitive.

I’m not sure. When it’s working, it feels inspired. It feels like I’m not there. Or that I’m tapping into something bigger than me, some force that’s guiding and moving me. I have assumed that it was my unconscious, which can to me be equipped with intuitions and instincts shaped by my ancestors, all the way back to the fish. Ancestors speak through me. However it works — I like it.