LOWCOUNTRY PAINTER JONATHAN GREEN
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Do you and your partner of 35 years always agree on style? Jonathan: Living together for many years, you kind of become one in terms of your aesthetics and appreciation. When Richard and I first met, he was all about surrealism and cubism, and I’ve always been interested in primitivism and impressionism with folk tied in to it. We just had to work on it. You both have to look at it everyday, and you’re both investing in it. It would be a disservice to the artist to have a piece in your home that one likes and the other dislikes.
Obviously, you’re not just an art collector; you are an artist yourself. How did you initially express yourself artistically? Jonathan: I never remember not being involved in art, even though I didn’t know the terminology, phrase, or word: art. I always had the ability to mimic. I could just look at something and draw it. Several members of the family became concerned with me always marking on things. So, my cousin started disassembling brown paper bags. She would iron them out and give them to me, because we were not allowed to use school paper to draw on. So, those were some of my earliest drawings as a kid—on brown paper sacks.
Did you enjoy that medium? Jonathan: I related to the medium because of the color of the paper in relationship to my skin tone. So, it just made sense for me. And, when I was able to paint on a white surface, it didn’t make any sense. So, when would you say you transitioned into painting? Jonathan: My first painting was probably at the age of four, and that was a paint-by-numbers set. I never painted within the lines, and I never used the color designated. (laughs)
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