Alan Green

Alan Green – Studies at several London art academies

Alan Green was born in London on 22 December 1932, the city where he spent a great deal of his life – the 1960s in particular, which decisively shaped his understanding of art and brought him his breakthrough as an artist. Before that, he studied illustration and graphic design at the Beckenham School of Art from 1949 to 1953, and from 1955 to 1958 at the Royal College of Art. Between these two periods, he served two years in the military as a cartographer in Korea and Japan from 1953 to 1955, where his drawing talent proved of great use. During his time in Japan, Alan Green visited the Japanese potter and ceramic artist Shoji Hamada (1894-1978). After graduating, he married the sculptor June Barnes in 1958, and they had two children. He undertook several teaching positions, taught at the Hornsey College of Art from 1958 to 1959 - where he met John Hoyland, a leading member of abstract painting in Great Britain – as well as Leeds College of Art from 1961 to 1966 and at Ravensbourne College in Kent in 1974. 

The artist understood painting as a physical act

In the 1960s, Alan Green began working on his characteristic colour field paintings, possibly also under influence of American abstract painting of the time. Colouring and applicability were the decisive criteria for Green, which also dictated the form. The declared goal was the creation of images with ambivalent functionality as a two-dimensional picture as well as a three-dimensional object. He produced his own paint, an approach he had acquired from Shoji Hamada, as well as combs and stencils for the application of paint, whereby his aim was to achieve the greatest possibly autonomy for his painting. The artist understood painting as a physical act, which he lived and mastered with great passion. He found a sympathetic partner and friend in the gallerist Annely Juda and her son David, with whom he worked fruitfully for over five decades and held thirteen solo exhibitions, and also participated in Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. 

Controlled conflict in the place of harmony

Alan Green championed abstraction as an artist, but always remained grounded in his ideas and goals. He accused many fellow artists from the second half of the 20th century of working with too much self-confidence and overloading their work with too much significance. He himself wanted to paint customary pictures that could be viewed again and again, and which were fed by honest experiences. Artistic integrity was so important to Green that in the 1990s, he began writing the catalogue texts for his exhibitions himself – also because he was of the opinion that criticism did not do full justice to his art, which consisted of only colour and form. An essential component of his art was controlled conflict, which Alan Green found more satisfying than the widely accepted ideas of harmony. Every colour and every shape should exist on its own in the picture, and assert itself against the other colours and shapes.

Alan Green died in Monmouth on 7 May 2003.