About Marilyn Green

“Marilyn Green creates the kind of art that a curator or critic yearns for in today’s art climate that is sadly dominated by a plethora of hype, shock and the mundane. She fuses diverse elements into an extraordinary sensitive perspective of the universal human condition with innovation and technical prowess. She follows her own vision and makes her indelible mark.”
— Renee Phillips, author and Director Manhattan Arts International

Marilyn Green is a visual artist currently living in Long Island, NY. Green has taught art, art history and writing in numerous universities and colleges, including Bellarmine University and Spalding University in Louisville, Wayne University in Detroit, Hunter College and New York University in New York City and the University of Cincinnati. She has also lectured extensively on art and humanities at universities in the U.S. and Britain. She has degrees in painting and music, and was a President’s Scholar and Ford Foundation Fellow.

Green’s work is in private and corporate collections in the U.S., Canada, Scotland, England, Spain, France and Croatia; the combination of visionary statement and humor have earned her warm reviews and she has been chosen for numerous grants and awards, including a Millay Colony Fellowship, a two-year salaried artist-in-residence position funded federally, and state arts council grants for work including oils, watercolors, film animation, batik and graphics. Her art has appeared on record album covers and commissioned for murals, dance performance and television.

She says: “My work deals with humankind’s relationship to other things, tangible and intangible. I see the line between ordinary life and spiritual experience or mysticism as very ephemeral, arbitrarily created by us to block out what we fear. Physicists tell us that what we regard as reality is only a small portion of what really exists, and that is certainly my experience.
“I paint the intersection between everyday life and the rich well of meaning and connection that illuminates it. The animals in my paintings, real or fantastic, are woven into a relationship with the rest of the world, and so are the plants and the suns, comets, stars and humans.”
Green’s studio is an old carriage house in Long Island

 

Artist’s Statement

My paintings are an attempt to bring the reality I see into this world. My greatest influences are Marc Chagall, William Blake and Paul Gauguin, along with medieval and renaissance art in symbolism and design, especially the Celtic images.

My work also is driven by my love of animals – so much so that I have created my own, usually a combination of the human animal and those who fly, swim and move around in fur or scales.

I‘ve always been fond of the Doors quote “There are things that are known and things that are unknown. In between there are the Doors.” It’s that juncture I’m drawn to: the mundane where it verges on the mystic, the intersection among people, plants and animals, the reality that exists just behind what we regard as reality. I love a touch of humor in my art and I enjoy it most when people look at something I painted and smile or laugh.

I’m often asked where I get my ideas and how I paint. I wish I could answer the first one. I come from a line of painters and I studied design, technique and color with good teachers, but images just come – it’s going to be a person perched on a high turtle shell. I start to block it in and a few other things become clear in terms of idea, not color. I draw it all in very thin yellow wash. Once it’s there, I work on something else – printing from a block, matting a watercolor – and then I come back and I see what’s right and what’s wrong and I change it and start to lay in color. Since I paint in thin washes, the colors build and change. I seldom work for more than 45 minutes at a time on one painting, and I usually have two or even three going at once. Often these are other ones in a series.

Since the formation of any idea on canvas or wood is the death of all the other possible ideas that came to mind, quite often I’ll get two or three down at one time and work from one piece to another.

I’d like to heal people, including myself, from fear, which I regard as the most destructive force in the universe, and the direct opposite of love.