"Marilyn Green creates the kind of art that a curator or
critic yearns for in today's art climate that is sadly
dominated by a plethora of hype, shock and the mundane.
She fuses diverse elements into an extraordinary
sensitive perspective of the universal human condition
with innovation and technical prowess. She follows her
own vision and makes her indelible mark."
-- Renee Phillips, author and Director Manhattan Arts
International
Marilyn
Green is a visual artist currently living in Long
Island, NY. Green has taught art, art history and
writing in numerous universities and colleges, including
Bellarmine University and Spalding University in
Louisville, Wayne University in Detroit, Hunter College
and New York University in New York City and the
University of Cincinnati. She has also lectured
extensively on art and humanities at universities in the
U.S. and Britain. Green has degrees in painting and
music, and was a President’s Scholar and Ford Foundation
Fellow.
Her paintings have been shown
extensively in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and France;
the combination of visionary statement and humor have
earned her warm reviews and she has been chosen for
grants and awards, including a Millay Colony Fellowship,
a two-year salaried artist-in-residence position funded
federally, and state arts council grants for work
including oils, watercolors, film animation, batik and
graphics. Her art has appeared on record album covers
and commissioned for murals, dance performance and
television.
Green’s work is in private and
corporate collections in the U.S., Canada, Scotland,
England, Spain, France and Croatia. Her paintings have a
strong relationship to the imagery in Cirque du Soleil,
although she was painting these archetypal figures 10
years before Cirque was founded. “When I first saw them
perform in the mid-1980s in Montreal, I was overjoyed,”
Green said. “I felt I was part of a much larger artistic
community.”
My work deals with
humankind’s relationship to other things, tangible and intangible. I
see the line between “ordinary life” and what’s often called
spiritual experience or mysticism as very ephemeral, arbitrarily
created by us to block out what we fear. Physicists tell us that
what we regard as reality is only a small portion of what really is,
and that is certainly my experience.
I paint the intersection between everyday life and the rich well of
meaning and connection that illuminates it. The Good Humor Man, for
instance, is an evocation of the warm summer evenings when the ice
cream truck comes around, but it also brings genuine good humor and
magical treats. The animals in my paintings, real or fantastic, are
woven into a relationship with the rest of the world, and so are the
plants and suns.
Of all the kind things that have been said about my painting, the
one I treasure most came from a patient in a hospital who told me,
“I’m not afraid when I look at this; I’m happy.”
I‘ve always been fond of the Doors quote “There are
things that are known and things that are unknown. In
between there are the Doors.” It’s that juncture I’m
drawn to: the mundane where it verges on the mystic, the
intersection among people, plants and animals, the
reality that exists just behind what we regard as
reality. I love a touch of humor in my art and I enjoy
it most when people look at something I painted and
smile or laugh.
