Building’s buzz drives the artist
Studio nestled in a hive of creativity gives Jacquie Green space to focus on her work
Artist Jacquie Green’s oasis is the place where she thinks and dreams and works — her studio.
It’s a former warehouse that’s been converted to offices and studio spaces at 401 Richmond St. W. Inside, there is a palpable buzz. And the hum comes not only from behind the studio doors, but from artists in the hallways, coming and going, juggling portfolios and cups of coffee. They’re always creatively dressed, and most know each other if not by name, then at least by face.
The building and its community of creative tenants is what prompted Green to lease her 800-square-foot studio 12 years ago. Access to that kind of energy helps inspire her, and it’s something she says she can’t get from a quiet studio at home.
As well, it gives her freedom from domestic distractions. “Every woman artist I know is challenged with protecting her work and time from all the things that vie for attention. Being able to have a place of your own away from those distractions really helps your work when you work for yourself, especially as an artist,” she says.
Her studio — with wide plank hardwood floors and a wall of floor-toceiling windows — is an oasis of calm, in the middle of the building’s creative storm, that allows her to concentrate. And work.
Green’s work is something she thinks of when “waking up and going to sleep. It poses a set of questions that are continually fascinating, problems to deal with and to solve.”
It’s also worlds away from her previous life as an elementary school teacher. She had never even picked up a paintbrush until enrolling in an evening printmaking course at OCAD University that she took to better understand the ways her gifted students learned.
But the course was life-changing; Green eased back to part-time teaching and then eventually moved to painting full time. The artwork Green says she has always painted the world as she “encountered it and experienced it, rather than it being out of my dreams, or my imagination. The visual world is truly amazing, endlessly surprising and constantly fascinating.”
But these days, her work is taking on more of a social message. It started with imperfect cellphone photos — heads cut off, faces out of frame — that presented an intriguing tension.
For example, a picture she took in New York City of someone walking several dogs prompted a whole series on dog walkers. In the photo, she’d cut off the woman’s head, but what remained was “the tension of one mass — the person — against another mass, the dog and the connecting leash.”
Another photo, of a young man with his face out of the frame, started her thinking about men out of balance, and out of context, in a world when they have no work. She started asking men about this, even holding informal discussion groups with men in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.
That launched a series which is “a metaphor for how men are in our society,” she says. “My concern is what happens to a world when men are in those circumstances, out of context, off balance and incomplete. Historically, work has provided men their completion, balance and context. And so I would ask how can we broaden the definition of how to be a man so that it’s not based solely on the work they do?”
Once she has figured out the key elements of a photo, she removes everything else and manipulates the image. “Sometimes, it’s changing the image from very dark to very light, or keeping the colours but not the pose. You start with that one thing, push it, then do a quick study to see if it works. When I think I know which way to go with it, I can start on the final surface — board, or linen or canvas.”