Joel Greene, New Mexico Modernist

Book excerpt: Joel Greene, who was raised in northern New Mexico, has been called one of the most elegant of abstractionists. His work includes landscapes, still lifes, and figures. Greene says he paints intuitively, but of all aspects of art he is most interested in drawing and organization--the architecture of a painting. In addition, though nature inspires him, his paintings come from memory and imagination, and many are idealized. Different types of paintings offer different kinds of artistic freedom. Still lifes offer the most freedom ("because it is easier to accept strange things in a still life") and figures, the least ("unless you are Picasso"). His landscapes are the softest, least angular of his work, and the work in which he can most glory in the way shapes, tones, lines, and color define space, form, movement. Greene's series of oil on panel paintings of Cundiyo rock formations and New Mexico landscapes are variations on a theme, in a muted palette of sandy browns, light and deep greens, and cool blues. He says he has "always been struck by the geological forces that shape our land: volcanoes, uplift erosion." He suggests this visually in a way that brings to mind a toned-down regionalism of Thomas Hart Benton combined with the shorthand abstraction of Milton Avery. Joel Greene's work is in the collections of such museums as the University of New Mexico Museum of Art, the Harwood Foundation, the Roswell Museum and Art Center, and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, among others.