Jim Green
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(b. 1947, San Angelo, Texas, USA)
In the early part of 2022, I made the switch from conventional painting on canvas to a painting on a virtual canvas. On canvas I painted realism and as my style developed, I began to move away from painting the world around me, to painting intuitively, without a preconceived outcome. Painting in the manner added physical layers which added weight, altered the surface texture, and contaminating the pure pigment underneath, in other words a dull, overly painted surface. I discovered that working virtually, I can bypass the physical breakdown on canvas, and still get the visual information down to produce an inkjet painting, minus tactility. By removing the penalty for "mistakes," a virtual canvas allows me to push through countless iterations while keeping my colors vibrant and my marks crisp.
I had a played around with Photoshop when I worked at a web design firm and quickly learned that I could subvert it's tools, i.e., make them do what they were designed to do. I have intentionally only used the basics of Photoshop in some attempt to avoid the slick commercial look. I came to realize that my process was better suited to what I could produce on a computer, not to mimic oils or acrylics, but instead to use certain aspects of each, iconically, in the process of producing a unique inkjet painting.
Three years later I started a series of computer paintings titled 'Painting, Not-Painting '. My process as a computer artist is my visual example of improvisational synergy, resulting in a work evolving organically into a completed picture. In the process of my constantly redirecting my picture, unexpected relationships form between my colors, shapes, and digital brushstrokes. I use a pop-art, image-salad approach to visually mirror the phonetic sounds and meaningless word-salad songs similar to the late-60s Beatles tracks such as - 'I Am the Walrus' or 'Come Together', etc. I take each work through a plethora of visual references and iterations until a picture begins to appear and everything coalesces into a cohesive visual scenario. I use disparate, everyday visual imagery (personal photographs, cartoons, portions of paintings, online images, newspaper and magazine photos, TV and music video screenshots), where the individual images often matter just as much as - or more than - their literal definitions.
My influences range from Rembrandt, Velázquez, Seurat, Magritte, Andrew Wyeth and Jim Dine to the styles of the Neo-Expressionists, such as Julian Schnabel and Albert Oehlen. And there are far too many painters from the 90s, both American and German, to mention here, whose styles and approaches gave me new ways of looking at art. One particular major influences on how I work goes to Jasper Johns. As a painter, his credo, "Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that", continues to be my main approach for creating pictures.
My main focus is to create unique, non-reproducible, "one-off" digital paintings, not as substitutes to mimic conventional painting, but instead to strip away the notion of what painting "should" be, and reframe the computer as simply another vehicle or device to create a tangible 2D work of art.