JIM GREEN

(b. 1947, San Angelo, Texas, USA)

For the past three decades, my main focus as a contemporary visual artist has been to find innovative ways that challenges the long-established boundaries of both traditional painting and contemporary painting. While living in Chicago, I had the luxury of being able to produce large format painting in a huge studio space. There, I experimented with various unconventional material such pigmented liquid synthetic rubber, house paint, pigmented industrial materials, etc.

In the early 2000s, I made my big move to NYC, where my first job was as a website designer. Living in the city was a big adjustment because I no longer had a space to make art in. Working with Photoshop, daily, producing commercial websites, I started spending time after work learning how to manipulate and subvert Photoshop's toolset, (i.e., to make each tool perform work in ways it wasn't designer for). Eventually, I purchased the editing program and began using it as contemporary art medium.

In 2016, I relocated to Los Angeles, CA., where I continued to push the boundaries of Photoshop. In 2024, I began a series of digital paintings titled Fragmente, which is loosely based on counterintelligence I performed for the now obsolete Army Security Agency. My job consisted of gathering encrypted information sent in fragments, which would then be put together and decoded by the NSA to reveal whole messages.

I use a similar, though improvisational construct as an example of how all things consist of individual fragments, or elements, that together make a whole. I start with a base, photograph, e.g., a freeze frame shot from my TV screen, music video, personal iPhone photo, photos appropriated from online newspapers. With no preconceived idea or image in mind, I begin piling on top of, into and around the photo, fragments of marks, strokes, occasional text, and appropriated portions of other people's paintings. Taking everything through countless iterations, a hint of a complete picture begins to form that is comprised of references to personal experiences, my psychology, and social perceptions.

Regardless of the application or process that is involved in how I create my artworks, it is the aesthetics and combined visual information, albeit ambiguous, that I am most interested in conveying. While a traditional painting provides tactility and a unique inkjet print does not, both are one-of-a-kind, which raises the question: What exactly defines a painting, especially when so much art is being produced using today's technological and printing processes? 
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