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Anna Mages: Your work often includes planes or fields of color that give your paintings structure and depth. This mark making is reminiscent of the edge of a palette knife or some hard edge. Can you elaborate on your process? Does the subject matter determine the kind of process you use for a given work?

Georganna Greene: I find subject and process to be very closely dependent on each other. I very rarely go in with a plan, but instead I usually allow the process to take shape in the way that it needs to. I love surprises…

Georganna Greene: A lot of times I am trying to describe the communication between solid objects and the kind of space that they’re in. I feel like this back and forth requires the flexibility and dynamism of oil paint for me… Over the last decade, I have investigated many versatile ways that you can communicate with the properties of oil paint: the way it smears, the way that you cut through it, how you can remove it, and how more medium changes its viscosity…

So, I really lean into experimentation with the medium. When my paint is being too predictable, I usually just stop and leave the room. Sometimes I either wash it out, start over, or come back to the painting later because it starts to fall flat for me…

Robert Enright said that “a painting is never done, you just decide to stop working on it,” which is absolutely how I feel. I could keep building up and cutting back forever on each painting. There’s almost a life moving through all of an artist’s work which we have to grow into…

I do feel as if I have been at a stage for a few years where I consider the whole of the practice more than any particular painting. Experimentation is a vital player in that kind of cyclical nature. I have to have multiple paintings happening in progress. This is where a lot of the joy of painting comes from for me as I remember and come back to all of the various ways that a painting can be made.

AM: With a work like Torch Lake, are you working outside in front of your subject matter? How is that different from a piece like Swim Lap?

GG: Torch Lake was part of a mini series in which I was really enchanted with the effects of light penetrating the surface of the water. I have been able to visit Torch Lake in the Upper Peninsula area of Michigan with my family and have taken a lot of photos over the years… In preparation for this piece, I ended up painting five or six studies to test out the relationship between the tones in the palette, but I did ultimately paint the piece from photos.

If I could do it again, I think I would paint it from life. There is just something about the “being there” that is important for me right now. At the time though, that was not as central to me and my thinking. It was more about investigating that relationship between watery substance, light, refraction, reflection, and the transcendental experience of being on a boat. I was interested in how we can become immersed in these visual components in a place that is separate from the chatter of life. This is definitely a thread that runs through all of the different directions of my paintings. I have to be able to quiet myself in order to hear any inspiration. I think some would say it is increasingly harder to find beauty with contemporary architecture styles and the prioritizing of efficiency. As artists, we have to reclaim the process of finding beauty. To do this, Torch Lake required a focused process to capture this one scene as special.

On the other hand, Swim Lap presents a point of view from a camera. There was something fascinating about this perspective to me. The light was hitting the swimsuit in just a way where it was starting to reflect this glowy halo of light onto the inner thighs. It is a moment in which we see a being that knows it is alive. The way that I chose to crop the scene created intimacy to the figure and abstraction to the legs… I am interested in harnessing perspective to stretch this fleeting private bit of happenstance into muscular shape, voluptuous color, gesture, edge, and expanse… In doing so, I moved from painting water to depicting a figure that would go swimming.

AM: Swim Lap also incorporates straws as a sort of frame to the piece. How did this emerge within your process?

GG: In the tranquil scene, the straws ended up being a formal exploration where I wanted to see if I could continue the lines outside of the picture plane. The language of gesture has been really central for me so I started to wonder about physical gestures that would come out into the space and interact more with the viewer. I do not know if I will keep going with that, but I do have some other object pieces that combine objects and painting which has been fun for me.

AM: I appreciate how you talk about the intimacy of the piece. Do you have a sense that the straws continue this intimacy?

GG: The painting seems to be so conscious of light and how we are affected by light physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It asks us to consider how light penetrates our psyche in quiet moments when we allow it to affect us… The straws' intervention in the space creates real shadows that punctuate the light, while offering continuity of form and color. The continuity of color - the pink of the straws echoing the skin tones in the painting - maintains this exchange between the figure and its frame, while the straws' natural bend and weightless structure create negative space around the figure.

AM: You have mentioned that geometry has played a significant role in your work. What are some sources and artists that you have drawn on?

GG: I am influenced by a lot of women painters and feel a particular kinship with German expressionism and Bay Area Figurative painting. Compositionally and visually, the worlds and landscapes created by Georgia O'Keefe and Agnes Lawrence Pelton often have introduced me to a type of transcendental awareness within our encounters with land, sea, sky - with natural environments. I was fortunate to get to see a survey of works on paper by O'Keeffe at the MoMA when I was in grad school, which included some of the most simple and striking watercolors of horizons and figures I'd ever seen. Her subjects all felt like they were interconnected and elemental, and she towed the line (beautifully) between observation and intuition. There is a piece of Pelton's at the Crystal Bridges Museum called Sand Storm (1932) that presents this brilliant coalescence of translation and imagination, brought to life by color theory. Two others of this era I love are Arthur Dove and Paul Klee.

In the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Richard Diebenkorn's simple still life compositions stir me up both visually and technically. Similar to the way he breaks down a landscape into large, velvety shapes, his paintings of knives interacting with various table-top items prompt us to think of painting as a vehicle for opening up new ways of seeing. Another key figure from that movement, Joan Brown, paired an intuitive type of paint handling with subjects like animals, food, patterns, interiors - she did some self-portraits in the studio as well. Her visual language helped her move through ideas of man vs. nature by sort of saying just enough and no more, no less. I feel a type of immediacy and earnestness with her approach.

Lastly, there are countless female powerhouse painters working in abstraction (and abstract expressionism) that I've learned from indirectly - many have German roots. Standouts are Charlene von Heyl and Anna Bjerger. While stylistically very different from each other, they both treat painting as a form of inquiry - through abstraction, symbolism, and at times metaphor. Lastly, Amy Sillman has been one of - if not the most - influential painters in my experience. She embraces awkwardness, contradictions, unknowns within the very definition of painting and treats each idea with a fresh set of tools, attention, generosity, and curiosity. I aspire to these and so many others!

AM: Can you elaborate on the process for creating a work like Summer Melons? What role does collage play in your paintings? Do you begin by collaging sources or collage the canvas as you develop your paintings?

GG: I feel so much joy when I make collages which are fundamental to my painting practice because they give me imagistic trial runs. Digital collage has been a tool for me to do the distorting before the painting. It allows me to get a bit of emotional distance from the subject that I am painting. I am always collecting images, requiring me to really hone in on my relationship to photography. I’m led to wonder, why is photography the default? It has become very exhausting to feel the need to paint from photos. It is as if my photography holds the fate of paintings in its hands. I am not a photographer though, so why am I relying so much on it? Right now, I leave it up to the individual piece whether or not photography is needed for the specificity of the work.

When photography is not needed, I enjoy painting from life, from memories, and being more intuitive with my process. The Garden Series has been an exciting exploration of that. Summer Melons is the first finished piece of this triptych series. I started it when we started our first summer garden last June. We had melons, squash, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. I had never gardened in this way before and I became amazed watching these vegetables grow large. I would go out everyday and observe the little changes taking place. There was something especially magical about the way that the melons would sprawl and take over. Rather than being a normal everyday thing, it was an alien activity to me because I live in a modern, industrialized world. So, I started painting in the garden and developed a concept for a show that I was curating about “Unwilding.” This piece was my contribution to this show that explored our broken natural planet.

This painting was all done in person. The collage look has to do with the way that I painted it. Since it was July, I could only paint for an hour and a half in the early morning and in the evening before being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Taking the piece in chunks, it was harder to focus on the whole. Rather than having a more harnessed control over the painting, I gave this painting over to the universe. The melons were growing and changing as I painted over time… A couple details needed photographic help, such as the flies, to get very articulate specificity. On the other hand, the background is approximate and painted without a photograph.

AM: Could you elaborate on how Summer Melons was informed by the relationship between time and atmosphere?

GG: There is a quality of time embedded in the painting because you are seeing the results of different moments. We are so used to using our cameras and the feeling of taking a snapshot that it becomes the stand in for a memory. Painting gives us the opportunity to move away from that expectation of everything being encapsulated in one snapshot… I think that if all the detail was in Summer Melons then it would be a very different kind of painting. But there was something about allowing a kind of smearing and distortion, creating a summary of what was there. When I am sitting in these gardens, it does not feel still in the way that my camera would capture it… Life is not perfectly curated and still. And so, painting the garden could not be from a photo… I was kind of creating a little universe, but I did not need to give the viewer all the information to be in that universe.

AM: Your mark making, spatial arrangement, and the use of line create captivating movement that pulls viewers further into your paintings. How has the relationship between spontaneity and intuition developed for you over time?

GG: I am actually working on some still life paintings right now of little setups in my studio. I often put this pressure on subject matter to be important or profound. To combat that, I will just paint a still life. And I'm always amazed at how through painting a very simple subject you arrive at somewhere new that you have never been. I think the reason it feels like I can almost paint anything and still learn is because the subject dictates the movement of your work. When I am looking at something as a subject, I am negotiating a set of relationships and my job is to decide what is important. For me, finding the true subject is often connected to the effects of light on the subject.

AM: Is there a connection to the idea of quieting yourself?

GG: In earlier series, my work was much more emotional in nature because of the season of life that I was in. There have been times where I've poured more of myself in emotional ways, and I think now it feels less emotional and more transcendental. My emotions are often reactions to what is going on in my life or around me, which is in its own way noisy. My emotions can add to the noise, and while there is definitely a place for them, to create a sustainable painting practice, I've had to do a little bit of distancing from that. One of my favorite painters, Amy Sillman, does such a beautiful job of letting her paintings tell her where they want to go. You can sense that there is emotion bubbling in there, but I don't feel like her work is being steamrolled by an emotional state. I feel like she's very meditative and there is some structure to that.

So, I do think that emotion lives in a painting, often experienced by the viewer or sometimes it is an outflow from the artist. However, I do not think it has to be both. As an artist, if you disclose your own emotional life, you have to be ready to lose a little bit of privacy. There are seasons where that works, but there are also seasons where you need to protect yourself by focusing more on the ideas or processes that drive the work. There is such a beautiful dance of science and poetry in the exploration of painting. What I experience is not as scientific as it is poetic and transcendental.

AM: To bring this conversation back to one of your paintings, can you discuss the conversation between subject and transcendence to Wood Knots and Advil?

GG: I was making small paintings for several months last summer from a ton of little ideas that I had. This one was from a photo of my wooden coffee table where a little Advil had been left behind. The way it was catching light from the window seemed to be mimicking the ellipse of the wood knots. It seemed almost planetary or celestial as if it was a little microcosm in a macro environment. This part felt kind of silly and fun. But also, these little pills are part of my daily life struggling with chronic shoulder pain. I started thinking about how reliant we are on modern medicine to even move and function. It is bizarre how much we allow chemicals to disrupt our circadian rhythms. The wood table is also significant to me personally because it belonged to my parents and I grew up with it as a child. The painting became poetic through capturing a little moment of light on a wood table, combining both the natural and the chemical. The old and the new are both present, and the whole thing is supported by these old paint brushes that can't be used anymore.

AM: I find the color of the pill so interesting in conversation with your other works. It feels very ethereal, almost like your paintings that focus on natural landscapes.

GG: As someone who has painted a lot of natural landscapes that evade the presence of built environments, there's this kind of reckoning that I've been doing. Our experience of nature is always a bit tarnished by our own activities as humans. And while there are scientific victories that are wonderful and very helpful, there's also the reality that humans are reliant on aggressive chemical interventions to not only live longer, but to move faster, and to be able to keep up with the pace of modern day life. All of this has been circulating and there is a bit that remains to be seen. I'm not making any big claims, but there's a little bit of a window. The color of the Advil, reminds us of a beautiful body of water. And I just wonder if the packaging of these medicines is supposed to be familiar and safe.

AM: When I saw Untitled Revelation, I was immediately intrigued by the snapshot moment that it seems to capture. It makes me wonder what narrative I've stepped into. I have a sense that this piece uses abstraction in a different way than some of your other works showcased here. Can you elaborate on how you see abstract techniques relating to moments of clear representation? Is there something different going on here? How do you see the relationship of narrative to your work?

GG: This piece emerged from a moment of precarious balance - standing on a studio stool while hanging drinking straws from the ceiling - when I began contemplating the interplay between stability and flux in our lived experience. The result is a painting of contradiction.

The work depicts legs ascending a wooden stool, rendered through layered paint strokes that both reveal and obscure, creating a visual dialogue between presence and absence. Working on a recycled canvas whose imperfections contribute to the work's temporality, I explored the sensation of being simultaneously grounded and adrift in an undefined blue current. For me this direction of work taps at the contemplative state of being - that space where we find ourselves swimming in thoughts and sensations, detached from our complete selves yet deeply present in our physical form.

Through various dichotomies - sharp and blurred, wet and dry, floating and grounded - these works explore how we navigate moments of uncertainty and desire equilibrium. The vertical format, reminiscent of contemporary screens and windows, provides a familiar frame for examining ephemeral experiences of movement, embodiment, and self-reflection.

Georganna Greene is an artist and educator, primarily working in painting. She earned her BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and her MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2021. Her practice explores material language, perception, and the tension between human design and natural order, using abstraction as a means for deeper knowing.

Between degrees, Greene worked in galleries and retail while maintaining an active studio practice at Ground Floor Gallery + Studios. Her background in art handling at institutions like The Frist Art Museum, Cheekwood, and Cumberland Gallery informed her interest in curation, facilitation, and collaborative work. She has taught at Boston University, Tennessee State University, and most recently held a full-time faculty position in Studio Foundations at Lipscomb University, where she also developed a gallery internship through Open Gallery, a student-led project space in Nashville's Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood.

Greene attended the Vermont Studio Center residency in 2023 and has participated in panels, visiting talks, workshops, and lectures at institutions including Lipscomb University, Watkins College of Art, COOP Gallery, Red Arrow Gallery, Parthenon Museum, Western Kentucky University Fine Arts Center, and Tyler School of Art and Architecture (virtual). Her work was collected by the local boutique Vandyke Hotel among numerous private collections and has been featured in The Tennessean, Nashville Scene, and Native Magazine. Solo and two-person shows include Air Dry with Danielle Fretwell at Commonwealth Gallery (2020) at Boston University and Limbic Slang at Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville (2022). Her work has shown in group shows at Crosstown Arts Memphis, Centennial Art Center, Piano Craft Gallery in Boston, Tiger Strikes Asteroid - New York, and The Historic Arcade in downtown Nashville. She is a member of the Nashville-based Post-Nothing Critique Group and continues to paint and curate in her hometown.

Anna Mages is a Summer 2025 Intern for Tri-Star Arts, currently based in the Chattanooga area.