The Art & Design Faculty Exhibition, which opens tonight in the Shore Gallery on the ACU campus, features group of deluge paintings by Robert Green. These three recently completed works are part of an ongoing series dedicated to the deluge theme. Like my prior works, these share much in common with Chinese landscape a paintings. Each has a vertical format and highly abstracted references to mountains, water, and various atmospheric conditions.
Marking systems typically used in map-making allude to these various landscape features. These do so in ways that shift in perspective.
The time-intensive work necessary to complete these paintings was supported by Cullen Grant from Abilene Christian University.
Plan to be in Abilene between Sept. 11 and Nov. 9, 2019? If so, you’ll have opportunities to see new works I’ve created up close and thoughtfully presented. I really encourage you not to miss these exhibitions! Many new works feature shifting visual effects and subtle passages that can’t be experienced in digital reproductions (see three examples below).
Opportunity 1: FLUX
The first exhibition Flux features drawings. While I’ve produced drawings throughout my career, I’ve never before assembled an exhibition exclusively of drawings.
At the core of this exhibition are two sets of five shaped drawings that have never been exhibited before! The originality and complex interrelationships among these ten works on paper made finding a way to present them a significant challenge. The drawings share a title, Hither and Thither, which is an apt description of the nature of the works.
You can see Flux at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Gallery 4, 220 Cypress St. in downtown Abilene from Sept. 11 – Nov. 9. Expect to see the Hither and Thither drawings and about a dozen other small drawings that laid the groundwork for those explorations.
Opportunity 2: COINCIDENCE OF OPPOSITES
From Sept. 27 – Oct. 18, I’ll be showing new paintings produced over the last two years. This exhibition is called Coincidence of Opposites and you can see it at the Shore Gallery on the ACU campus. My co-conspirators for this show are friends and fellow artists Polly and Kenny Jones. I’m honored to be exhibiting with them again. Our two previous exhibitions together were Terra Incognita in 2013 and Palimpsest in 2008.
In Coincidence of Opposites, I’ll be presenting two different strands of work, one serious and the other a bit more playful and paradoxical. The first strand is a set of four paintings that pay homage to specific artworks produced by Chinese landscape painters working between the 15th and 17 centuries.
I adopted the practice of such artists to paint, as a form of tribute, in the manner of an admired master. I set out to pay a tribute of my own by “recreating” (initiating a dialogue with) four Chinese works using the language of maps. Such an approach ensured that the resulting works would be intercultural, hybrids of Eastern and Western ideas, values, and techniques. That I used a marking system strongly associated with quantitative and rational (e.g. scientific) impulses ensured that the new works meld different viewpoints and purposes.
The second strand is made up of small paintings on canvas boards and panels. In these works, I employ the language of maps in whimsical, self-contradictory ways. The works collapse pictorial space, seem intentionally self-contained, and hint at real and imagined environmental contradictions.
