Ted Green

Oodles

Jackson's Art Prize 2024
Oil
Canvas
190 x 160 cm

£8,000

“The compositions of the paintings in this current body of work stem from listening to music, and from the desire to “make a painting that looks like that song sounds”. I was struck by the idea of various sets of repeating acoustic signals, or rhythms, meshing together over time in a piece of music. But since I don’t work with sound, but rather with line and color, I translate this idea into a visual form, using the starkly biomorphic formal language that I have used for many years.

I try to avoid giving much thought as to how the finished product will look like; this allows me more freedom in allowing the piece to grow in an organic manner. By continuously repeating one mark or line at a time in a ritualistic manner, I build up a set of similar abstract shapes which are organized into rows or columns, thereby referencing a range of visual phenomena from musical notation to flowcharts to psychedelia. I aim for an orderly composition, yet executed in gestural, expressive mark-making – I consider the work as much conceptual as it is formalistic, and for me these two terms are not opposites, but simply options.”