Float and Stay On:
Sean Greene sees the light in skateboard moves and color interaction
Attempts to convey an essential experience of light animate Sean Greene’s paintings, coupling abstracted form with exuberant color and connecting calculated austerity with intuitive flow. “I was going after the sensation of light and understanding how it works in our world,” he says.
Greene began by strategically observing rectangles of light streaming in through a window and then reducing that visual information to its underlying geometry. As he explains, “I was playing with rectangles and parallelograms, creating what I call ‘light forms,’ and getting deeply engrossed in the study of color.” He was not interested in a literal depiction but in the pulsating impression of light and color, evoking an emotional content or a contemplative state.
“We’re blasted with visual information that most of the time wants to sell us something,” he points out. “My goal is not to sell anything, but to help people towards a meditative consciousness, for an awareness of looking at art that then extends out into the world.” He hopes people will walk away from his paintings with a heightened perceptual awareness, thinking, “Wow! Look at that light!” while gazing around their own worlds.
At first, he made paintings that seem monochromatic, but slowly reveal very slight, very subtle differences in color saturation. To achieve these small variations, he used syringes to precisely measure and mix color in mathematical increments. But he found very few people could commit enough time to recognize such super subtleties. He says, “You almost had to live with the work to ‘get it.’ I wanted to give people more entryways into my work and bring them along with my joy in color and light.”
So he increased color contrast and added curves to the composition. In the “Typograph” series, ribbons of saturated color twist against a gray background, to create an effect of layers through variations in intensity. Greene still used syringes to meticulously measure more or less of the background gray into the colored pigments, but the forms themselves begin to dance.
“It’s very basic stuff: figure; ground,” he demurs. The closer the figure is in color to the background, the more it recedes. The greater the difference between figure and ground, the more the figure pops forward. Describing his methodical approach he says, “I thought, if I do it in mathematical increments, it will always work…and it worked up to a point, until I started using multiple colors.” Then, he discovered, doing the math didn’t account for different pigment strengths or the complexity of color interactions.
“Typograph Seven” has strands of three different hues, which, he says, “created all sorts of complications, leading me to question the whole mathematical part of color calibration.” So he abandoned formulas to embrace a more intuitive approach. “It brought me to creating an atmospheric, spatial experience with colors drawing paths through an ambiguous space,” he continues. “These curved forms opened so many doors to ways of describing space, and then space, in turn, related to how we experience light.” He caused further complications by changing the neutral gray background to a more assertive dark red in the “Calligraph” series and creating, with contrastive color, complex overlapping forms.
These forms, he says, start out intuitively, influenced by “a major force in my life, which is skateboarding.” Greene also recalls that his initial attraction to art started with seeing graffiti spilling over the walls of New York, in “an explosion of colors and shapes, words I couldn’t read…it was visually so exciting.” He sees, in retrospect, that the fragmented letter forms in both “Typographs” and “Calligraphs” hark back to graffiti. “I don’t see my work as ‘skateboard painting,’” he emphasizes. However, the swooping lines convey a sensation of weaving and floating, sinking and swirling, and, as Greene explains, the rhythm of skateboarding gives him access to playfully improvise with form and flowing movement in space.
Moving along from monochromatic paintings to the austere gray “Typographs” to deep-red grounded “Calligraphs,” Greene’s latest paintings take a giant leap into fields of foreground color. “Suggestions” intermingle figure and ground with forms that spill off the edge of the canvas. Has also started titling work, as he says, “to give people more access to what I’m doing.” The titles don’t explain, but come from words or phrases with some resonance. “They suggest something else and lead me to another idea,” he says. “ ‘Try Letting Go’ –well, that’s advice I give myself.” Another painting draws its title, “Float and Stay On,” from his comment to a fellow skateboarder at the flow bowl in the Northampton Skate Park.
In the “Calligraphs,” the red ground surrounds and contains foreground images. But in the most recent paintings, he says, “I started letting things go…and they go right off the edges.” The paintings become a window into a world where bands of light extend beyond what our eyes can see. This canvas as a metaphor for a window, notes Greene, is traditional Renaissance view of painting, and this idea also loops back, in reverse, to his earlier studies attempting to capture and convey the effects of light entering through a window into the viewer’s space.
The forms painted on an outdoor mural not only go off the edge but also around the corner (on two walls outside Bread Euphoria in Haydenville). This mural has the red ground of the “Calligraphs,” but like the “Suggestions,” its lines of color swoop to the edge. It’s a brilliant splash of color snuggled among the weathered wood of the building. A row of blue-glazed pots and a spiraling green hose extend the colors and flowing lines into the environment. Greene notes that the cinderblock surface, along with the scale (eight by twenty-six feet), posed challenges, as did a drainpipe, which he carefully painted over as part of the ebb and flow of color. A recessed doorway, electrical wires, and overflow pipes are similarly swept into the overall design.
Greene brushes aside some cobwebs and twists the knob on the door. “I really like the way I can literally enter the space of the painting,” he says as he steps inside, turning the traditional “window” of the painting into an entryway for perception.
