ARTIST STATEMENT:

My paintings are rooted in intervals of color that provoke the fleeting sensations of light animating space. Bands of colored light are paths, traces of motion that lead the eye through a space and around a surface. They evoke written languages like Arabic or graffiti—illegible to most but loaded with expressions of balance and instability.

In exploring ambiguous pictorial spaces, my involvement in skateboarding has entered my work. Finding the possibilities and limits of the canvas and its interior, I constantly ask where to go, whether to curve or angle, advance or recede, and when to stop. Every form has a unique quality with varying degrees and combinations of speed, grace and aggression. The canvas is the bowl or the street. The forms are the ways through the space.

Try Letting Go is a painting that I could not have previously imagined making. It startles me with conflict and opinionated awkwardness. The making of abstract paintings is a reciprocal dialogue with ones wants and ones state of being. In my best moments, I can both come to terms with and resolve potential turmoil into some unknowable expression of—well, something.

Learn more about Sean Greene.