Green's style falls somewhere between surrealism and pop art, with hints of op art. He sought to capture the straightforwardness and mystery evoked in these surrealist's paintings. He also enjoyed the work of
James Rosenquist, whose work was more about surface than substance; however, Green's objects appear to have a psychological rather than just a visual presence. Imagery includes ice cream cones, bridges, incomplete bridges, mirrors, scissors, women's painted fingernails, passionate couples, tires, moons floating over water, puzzle pieces, silhouettes of a plane flying overhead, searchlights, tornados, women's nylon-covered legs, wood grain, leather cords, screws, cables, knots, zippers, tapes, stitches, Necker cubes, and other optical illusions. Though the illusory depth of his paintings is not all that deep, the viewer still finds himself looking at, into, and through his paintings. Green's artwork is full of dichotomies. He had a keen interest in examining our relationship to reality, or, more specifically, the difference between looking and seeing and the rewards of the latter. He combined order and chaos, but every force is balanced and contained. This order calms the chaos in time; the viewer is rewarded for spending time with his canvases as hidden objects reveal themselves in an endless tension between rationalism and irrationalism. Though their primary interest in exhibiting together stemmed from the fact that they were all friends and colleagues, there are stylistic similarities in their artwork. All of these artists' work have tendencies towards a cartoon style or pop art; there is a high degree of visual resolution in their drawings and paintings and a sense of horror vacui fills their canvases. The canvases, too, appeared to be constructed from individual pieces of polished glass; his paintings became monuments to a secular campy artificiality. Nothing was quite as it seemed in these canvases, where Green was more interested in disrupting the narrative via a manipulation of both form - i.e. he uses shaped canvas - and content - i.e. the scenes within his paintings appear cropped, giving only sensuous and flickering views of a hidden tale.
Noteworthy pieces •
Absolute Purity, 1967,
Tastee-Freeze series •
Immoderate Abstention, 1969, Fire and scissors •
Saturated Fat, 1971, Tastee-Freeze series •
Blank Slate, 1978, oil on canvas. First painting of an extended series that involve images of mirrors. •
Risky Business, 1980, a fire-and-fingernail totem with a layered and
shaped canvases •
Persons Unknown, 1985, layered and shaped canvases •
Double Crosser, 1991, imagery is secured, wired, lashed, tied-off, taped, and fastened with screws •
Circular Argument, 1994, layered and shaped canvases ==Collections==