Jazz Green

Jazz Green is an artist who seems to share my fascination with decay and erosion: the intricacies of colour, fragile structures, the delicate processes of gradual deterioration. He utilises a range of salvaged and reclaimed materials in his work, and maximises on the forensic capacity of macro photography to provide him with a range of initial visual references and appropriated compositions.

Many of his mixed media artworks are characterised by earth colours and multi-layered, textural qualities: deliberately intricate reinventions and subtle explorations of surface and patina. What I love about her work is that when each piece is looked at individually and detached from their original visual source, the artwork becomes more abstract and multi-sensory. All the work has a strong metaphorical pictorial language: quiet, gentle, with symbolic renderings on broader perceptions of abandonment, loss, transience or impermanence.

Her photographs:

Shed 2004. Digital Photograph 30cm x 30cm

Plywood 2004. Digital Photograph 30cm x 30cm

Fence 2005. Digital Photograph 30 x 30cm

Floor 2004. Digital Photograph 30cm x 30cm

Wall 2005. Digital Photograph 30cm x 30cm

Jazz Green's paintings also have a beautiful textural quality. This is a close-up of Rubel, which was begun in late 2004 and has been through many stages, adding successive layers of pigment (mostly red oxides), ink and diluted white paint, then finally burnishing with carnuba wax to give a subtle lustre to the surface. Rubel is merely an old English spelling of rubble.

Here is a detailed close-up image of Sylte 2006. This work merges from a textured, crumbled brown, bronze black into a more mellow and eroded surface. Many of the markings are not directly applied paint, but a myriad of negative traces, made by a process of layering and then revealing colours beneath. Silt, when separated from mud, is quite exquisite to look at, a mix of tiny, almost shimmering fragments of sand and other mineral traces. The marsh river valley in which Green lives is very windswept and the roads flood frequently, and so mud and silt in all its forms is a daily encounter.