JACK GREENE

I knew I would be an artist at the age of six on a day when I was sitting in my father's studio and he was painting a portrait of me. I remember smelling turpentine and feeling excited by the atmosphere.

 

I began formal classical training at the Boston Museum School in 1958 with a major in painting and a minor in sculpture. At the end of my fifth year,  I spent a year in Europe on a traveling scholarship, visiting museums  and painting for seven months while living in Greece and Spain. The next year I returned to the Museum School to teach watercolor and drawing and to curate exhibitions of student work.

 

I had started my painting career as a realist doing portraits and landscapes. By the mid 60's my work had become abstract. I listened to Bill Evans, Miles Davis & John Coltrane and other musicians while I painted and the abstraction of jazz was my  inspiration, music for my soul. In the 70's, I began to use the airbrush to make geometric paintings sprayed in oil, finely gradated sequences of color, patterns of structure, and spatial tensions of varying surface textures. By the 80's I was photographing found objects and using the photo negative imagery in my paintings. I spent many enjoyable hours editing and reconstructing the imagery, and experimenting and inventing, using a wide range of expression.

 

Beginning in 1995. I started to make low relief paintings which led me, over the next 15 years, into making high relief polychrome wall sculptures. Most recently, I am still making wall reliefs and have also returned to making two dimensional painting. My work, which I think of as images of visual exploration transformed by the intuitive process, free association and the subconscious, continues to evolve and  change. Catch me with my latest.

I knew I would be an artist at the age of six on a day when I was sitting in my father's studio and he was painting a portrait of me. I remember smelling turpentine and feeling excited by the atmosphere.

 

I began formal classical training at the Boston Museum School in 1958 with a major in painting and a minor in sculpture. At the end of my fifth year,  I spent a year in Europe on a traveling scholarship, visiting museums  and painting for seven months while living in Greece and Spain. The next year I returned to the Museum School to teach watercolor and drawing and to curate exhibitions of student work.

 

I had started my painting career as a realist doing portraits and landscapes. By the mid 60's my work had become abstract. I listened to Bill Evans, Miles Davis & John Coltrane and other musicians while I painted and the abstraction of jazz was my

 inspiration, music for my soul. In the 70's, I began to use the airbrush to make geometric paintings sprayed in oil, finely gradated sequences of color, patterns of structure, and spatial tensions of varying surface textures. By the 80's I was photographing found objects and using the photo negative imagery in my paintings. I spent many enjoyable hours editing and reconstructing the imagery, and experimenting and inventing, using a wide range of expression.

 

Beginning in 1995. I started to make low relief paintings which led me, over the next 15 years, into making high relief polychrome wall sculptures. Most recently, I am still making wall reliefs and have also returned to making two dimensional painting. My work, which I think of as images of visual exploration transformed by the intuitive process, free association and the subconscious, continues to evolve and  change. Catch me with my latest.