The Artist: Malcolm Green was born in Leigh-on-Sea, England, where he spent the first 18 years of his life. He exhibited his first paintings and collages while at Reading University. He continued painting while studying for a Master´s Degree in at Nottingham, where in 1973 he began training as a classical dancer. The dance took him to Austria and Germany, where he worked as a soloist in several experimental dance companies for ten years and toured widely throughout Europe. During the last years of his dance career, Malcolm co-founded Atlas Press in London, a publishing venture dedicated to the avant-garde of the last 100 or so years (link: www.atlaspress.co.uk), and which has since produced at least as many titles. This work proved absorbing and for over a decade Malcolm Green found little time for painting, yet he came increasingly in contact with artists of the avant-garde, most notably Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch and Dieter Roth. During a lull in the activities of Atlas Press in the mid-nineties, while staying in Kathmandu, he resumed his artistic work, adopting a technique he has seen used on the protective metal sheets at the back of the cycle rickshaws in Nepal: a pattern is hammered into the metal from the reverse side using a hammer and nail, and the raised design coloured in. Malcolm developed this technique using aluminium and high gloss oil-based paint, and encouraged by, among others Dieter Roth, has created over 100 works and shown them in various exhibitions. The contact with Dieter has led Malcolm more recently to become a member of the Dieter Roth Academy (link: www.dieter-roth-academy.de) The page with the drum icon consists primarily of the Smaller Works in this technique, in the small LP-sized format (31 x 31 cm). The choice of this format was curiously made in a land in which the LP has completely vanished - Nepal - and it was only after returning to Europe with a pile of foot square sheets of metal and painting the first three of four works that the artist even noticed that the paintings were LP sized. Further works can be found on the page Largesse via the homunculus icon, which is dedicated to larger works or small series (diptychs and triptychs). This section contains the majority of new works included in this update in October 2005, although most pages offer suprises to old friends of this site. As will be apparent by now, the works are variously in English and German. The frustrated monoglot will find translations in the list of works below (which at present requires updating). This is especially true of two pages: Red Skelton´s Red Skeleton and Variations, to be reached via the green skeleton icon, and Die Wursttage via the red sausage icon. The Red Skelton paintings, completed in 1998 but with a number of subsequent variations, centre on the figure of the renowned American comedian, Red Skelton, or more correctly on his skeleton. The “Wursttage” centre on an old obsession (cf. various sausage pix scattered about this site) and a play on German words: starting with “Weisswurst am blauen Montag” (= White sausage - a Bavarian speciality - on Blue Monday), they permutate through a speculative range of sausage colours and various days of the week. White Sunday, for instance, is Low Sunday in English; Gründonnerstag (= Green Thursday) is Maundy Thursday; Rosenmontag (= Rose Monday) is the great day of German carnivalising, or in English the day before Pancake Day. The variations on the next page (marked MORE) take the redness of the Skelton/skeleton iconography and vary it in numerous ways.
Should anyone wish to get back to a beginning of sorts, they can click the Temple of More icon (far left), or the Home Page icon (near left) for home. The latter also takes them to the work of the last two years, very large format (up to 3.6 x 2.5 m) prints done on vinyl in editions of three.
Additional icons include an old photo of The Artist to get you to this page, and the communicating gargolye who will help you to Contact the artist and his e-mail address, make any enquiries, and ask about individual pictures. This page also includes links, and information on other parts of Malcolm’s production (CDs, books, etc). The Red Sphinx speaks for itself.
Finally: the works shown on these pages have been digitally photographed or scanned in from conventional photos. The extremely glossy nature of the paint, combined with large sections of shiny aluminium, are not unproblematic, and at points the artist has been moved to digitally compensate for the one or other limitation in the photographs. This has not been done with the wicked intention of pulling the wool over the visitor´s eyes, but rather to recreate a faithful impression of the original. Similarly, some of the images have been captured in bright conditions creating lots of reflections, whilst others are somewhat “flatter”. This is intentional: all of the paintings change strongly with varying light conditions and respond to the colours and objects surrounding them, meaning that any one photo merely records one of many possibilities. As a photographer, the artist has revealed himself to be an impressionist!
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