Diane Green's painterly abstractions offer a welter of natural associations, including flowers, stones, meadows, mountains, clouds and swamps. In Green's metamorphosed version of nature, it's hard to keep things separate: a floating organic shape simultaneously inhabits several planes; hybrid forms display aspects of plant life, rocks and suggestions of human forms; a single painting can be at once a landscape anal an interior. The largish painting
A.M. + F. (Green titles her works with mysterious initials) is a good instance of this conjoining of openness and interiority. More than 6 1/2 feet high and nearly as wide, the composition overlays a background redolent of a mist?covered swamp with ornate, Gustave Moreau like clumps of line and color. As in many of Green's works, this abstraction suggests neither landscape nor interior, rather it's like a landscape transposed (and transformed) into an enclosed space. In most of the 12 paintings in this showthe artist's first solo in New York fields of mottled green served as the backgrounds for concatenations of biomorphic shapes growing, like coral reefs or creeping vines, from the edges of the canvas. Often these sinuous forms stretch out toward the center; in other cases they are clumped together in one corner of the canvas. Green often surrounds them with flurries of white lines which, in addition to activating the surface of the canvas, serve to catch and reflect the gray, wintery light which suffuses the paintings. The artist uses this light to hold and balance the small, localized pockets of vivid color which are embedded in the coloristically subdued but gesturally vigorous background.
Alongside the rampant organicism, Green admits figural presences which impart a semblance of narrative and establish a focal point to the paintings. In S.L. 1, for instance, underneath a canopy of feathery lines and impacted forms, a slather of white paint and a curving line come together to constitute humanlike apparition in
