Four

No man’s land

BY Mel Cousipetcos and Campbell Boyer, October 30, 2012

Artist Rona Green’s work is completely and uniquely characterful in every sense of the word, and not just because it features a range of ‘characters’ dreamed up out of Green’s past and present experiences, influences and relationships. Her gang of part-human/part-animal figures each bring a personal story to the table, often told through an adornment of bad-ass tatts. I can only describe them as kind of a bunch of weirdo, slightly dangerous mongrels who are (somehow) completely endearing at the same time. As we pry into the mind from which they’re all born, Green confesses that “the most important thing about my creative practice is that it amuses me, so I make pictures I enjoy.”

Talk us through the process of how one of your characters is realised.
Pretty much all of the characters are an amalgamation of observation and imagination. To generate characters my preferred methodology is gathering imagery, collecting words, joking around, collaging, constructing personalities, manipulating esoteric information, being playful.  

What inspired this animal-human hybrid your characters take on?
The symbolic, highly stylised man-beast gods of Egyptian painting and sculpture resonated with me as a child and their powerful effect still lingers.

You work across a range of mediums — drawings, prints, paintings and even digital. What determines the medium used to realise any one of your ideas? Do you prefer to work in one medium in particular?
Over time I have experimented with many techniques to produce different types of work. Challenging myself technically keeps things interesting. Being an artist is all about being curious, and exploring various mediums is part of this. Most recently I have concentrated on making hand coloured linocut prints and painting with acrylic on canvas. But everything stems from drawing.

Are you possibly adorned with as many tattoos as your characters?
Some of the characters in my artworks have heaps more tattoos than me. Many of the people around when I was a kid had tatts and I’ve always liked them. My use of the tattoo as a motif is fired by its capacity to evoke a story. Tattoos can convey information about origin, affiliation, status and proclivities. They also has the ability to incite strong reactions from the viewer.

What is your earliest creative memory?
Entering a bike decorating competition in primary school, which incidentally I won (largely due to my mum’s help threading streamers through the spokes).

What other creative fields/artists inspire you?
MMA fighters – some of those guys are true artistes, not to mention aesthetically pleasing. A few favourite visual artists are Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon and Ed Paschke.

What would you like people to take away from your work?
One could go on and on about what the work does or doesn’t say, however if the art can’t speak for itself then it has failed to fulfil one of its primary purposes. Art is a collaboration between the creator and the viewer; the work can’t speak if nobody is there to hear, and what they take away is essentially up to them.

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All artwork (linocut, ink and watercolour) by Rona Green
ronagreen.com

Tags Art, Illustration, Ink, Linocut, Portrait, Rona Green, Tattoos, Watercolour