Chance Would Be a Fine Thing
CHRISTOPHER GREEN
Christopher Green has done wonders for the Bickleigh Arms. There is a plant. There is an ashtray. There is some talk of the impending inauguration of a vegetable patch. Bobby Dowler informs me that this new orderliness is a consequence of his success in luring girls round to cook him dinner. I am unconvinced.
I suspect instead that it is Christopher Green who has succeeded in imposing some modicum of order on the Bickleigh’s previously glimpsed predisposition towards chaos. Christopher Green, neat in the patterns of his thought and speech yet animated by a curious élan, achieves a similar reconciliation of spontaneity and calculation in his conversation and his work.
Christopher Green, gratifyingly for an interviewer, does not seek merely to trammel the course of conversation towards the justification of principles previously decided upon. Neither does his work aspire to the mere illustration of preordained ideals: the process of creation is described as being “like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle without the aid of the completed image from which to refer”. Christopher Green's is an ideology of growth and possibility, a doctrine of potentiality.
Christopher Green's work depends upon the dramatic tension of staged compositional elements. There is an attractive theatricality to the dynamic interaction of colour, line and shape in these pieces. This schematised freedom, equivalent to that guiding the natural world, encourages a recognisably organic creative process, a disciplined improvisation. There is an elemental drama to Christopher Green's employment of colours "bold within their context" that react with and against their created environment.
Christopher Green talks revealingly of watching Devon's "dark grey sky when the rain came".
The establishment of a framework within which spontaneity is allowed to flourish invests Christopher Green’s thought and work with a controlled vigour. Supervising these creations, Christopher Green set out to create a “structure within which I could incorporate elements of chance through the making of marks”. The pieces are provided with an impetus of their own, allowed to grow within a scaffold that does not predetermine their ultimate composition. His previous work, ‘The Way Things Grow’, was “based around the idea of the organized sowing of seeds and the uncontrollable path of natural growth”. So Christopher Green works as supervisor, facilitator – there is no sense of a tyrannical imposition, of dogmatism. The works are allowed to grow into their own identity.
“When the picture makes sense to me it is finished… it is an object in its own right". This is the providential beauty of Christopher Green’s work.
