Joel Greene

As an art student at the University of Iowa, Joel Greene was immersed in the world of printmaking, with its methodical process and the meticulous overlay of images in a multicolor etching or engraving. Perhaps for this reason, when he turned his attentions to painting in the early 1980’s, it was the “architecture of a painting”, as he puts it, that captured his interest. Traditional representational painting, with its depth of visual perspective, realism in details and storytelling capacity, was fine for other artists.  But Joel’s creative senses were rocked, and still are, by the artistic freedom he inherited from the European and American Modernists of the late -19th and early -20th centuries, in particular the Cubists. It was freedom –revolutionary in its time – to perceive an object or scene, dissolve it into constituent elements of color, perspective, movement, line and form, and put it back together in an entirely new and fresh way.

 

Working in his first Santa Fe studio on Early Street, Joel began what has become his modus operandi as an artist: serious play. After years of art-history study, both formal and on his own, he set his gaze on artists and periods that attracted him most. Then he turned to the canvas to see what would happen as he expressed his own world through the energy absorbed from earlier masters. The German Expressionists gave him vivid color, as in Trees (1984) and Nudes in the Landscape (1985). But it was Picasso and Braque who gave him permission to flatten the picture plane and rearrange objects to suit his sense of geometry, visual cadence and design.

 

Through his paintings and prints Joel maintains what one admirer describes as a conversation, a lively exchange with the great Modernists of the past. With the New Mexico landscape permeating his experience, this dialogue echoes especially the artistic voices of New Mexico Modernists of the early 20th century, such as Andrew Dasburg, Jozef Bakos and Marsden Hartley. Yet Joel’s contribution to the conversation is uniquely his own.  As his work has evolved over the years, he has refined a visual vocabulary of swirling shapes and volumetric forms that seem to define the essence of this place and its topography, vegetation and weather, allowing the viewer to take part in the exchange in an ongoing way. As gallery owner Ernesto Mayans puts it, “In changing the reality of painting, Joel Greene is also changing our perception of reality.”

 

—by Gussie Fauntleroy