Alan Green
British abstract painter of dense, worked, almost monochrome surfaces built layer over layer.
Alan Green was born in London in 1932 and studied at Beckenham and the Royal College of Art. From the late 1960s he worked within deliberately narrow limits: a squared or divided canvas, a restricted range of greys, browns, blacks and off-whites, and a surface built from many thin layers of oil, each partly covering the last, so that the finished picture holds a great deal of activity within very little apparent variation. He exhibited widely in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, showed with the Annely Juda and Juda Rowan galleries, and worked in Kent until his death in 2003.
This is a specialist market, concentrated in Britain and Germany, and quiet relative to the artist's standing among painters. The oils on canvas are the core; scale and date do most of the work in a valuation, with the 1970s and 1980s paintings generally the most sought. Green was also a serious printmaker in etching and aquatint, and worked extensively on paper in mixed media, often with the same layered method. The surfaces are matt and unvarnished, so surface dirt, abrasion and any past cleaning are visible and material.
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