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Aviva Green |
| mixed media paintings | |
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| I work directly from
nature. In the field, I draw intuitively and rapidly. I make notations- sometimes swatches
of color, sometimes words - to bring back to the studio. Whether I'm working on a hillside
in the Galilee or along the Maine coastline, I find an aura particular to each location. I
call this aura the "color of sound." My subject matter might be a single flower
or a thorny cluster or reading from an ancient text." I look at a lot of diverse artists. They are like old friends and at the same time fresh adversaries - Picasso, Chagall , Matisse, Leger, Marsden Hartley, Nachum Gutman, Philip Guston, Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeois . I look at Der Brucke, at Persian miniatures, and at archeology from the ancient Middle East. I look at movies and MTV. The entire process is dominated by a profound sensory and sensual experience. My students at Harvard used to ask me if I was hallucinating or if my florals were on steroids. It's not a 9 to 5 life. It's ongoing and nonstop with long periods in the studio perhaps just staring into space along with the heavy physicality of the work itself. It is, as Matisse said, a hell of a way to make a living." My paintings are a direct transformation of the wonder of childhood. I grew up in Washington, D.C . My father was an orthodox rabbi - an unusual man - a great humanist - and a scholar of Talmud and of Greek and Hebrew philology. My mother, beautiful and a closet bohemian, was a poet. She wrote in Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish. We had an unusually esthetic household even though there was no painting or sculpture in the house (according to strict Orthodox prohibition against the graven image.) The sound of language was an important part of my childhood. The Yiddish writer Chaim Grade was a close friend and frequent visitor to my parents' home. I recall how he and my parents would read Yiddish poetry and fiction aloud for hours together. But my warmest and somehow most vivid recollection of language is of my parents reading, aloud, just to me, from the Hebrew Bible. How the declarative cadences of the language of Genesis enthralled me ! They fueled my imagination and filled me with color .... The settings, the images, were all very large and utterly alive for me. And when as an adult, I began to study painting and later to develop my own painting vocabulary, I retrieved and willingly surrendered to this very large, very warm, very organic, very first esthetic .... and I've been having a lot of fun with it ever since." |
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Mixed Media Paintings below Please click on paintings for enlargements. Aviva Green New Works: Black and White Series Large scale paintings and fiber sculpture are available for commissions in corporate and public spaces, in addition to Aviva's smaller pieces created on a more intimate scale. Please click for a sample of an Aviva Green fiber commission the fiber sculpture under the Chagall Windows of the Chagall Chapel, Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem. |
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