Biography

Peter Green OBE RE (1933-2023) was a British Artist/Printmaker and Art Educator.

Born in 1933, he left school at fifteen and studied at Tunbridge Wells School of Art and Brighton College of Art, qualifying as a specialist art teacher.

After qualifying, he taught for three years in a secondary school and began to develop his professional work as a printmaker.

From the outset and throughout his career, Green saw teaching and his work as a professional artist as interdependent and of equal importance. While still teaching at secondary school, he began to produce large linocuts and woodcuts, in addition to some smaller wood engravings. Being short of working space and also with limited time for printmaking, he began to explore, out of necessity, direct and simple methods of printmaking, which allowed him to produce large numbers of prints, produced within short periods of work. His prints were made without using a press (applying pressure with a roller or burnishing with a rag pad or Japanese style ‘baren’ – or even walking on the larger prints!). He also developed a method of paper stencil printing, applying colour with a roller directly onto the print through a stencil shape, which was a quick way of applying numerous colours. At this stage, he also explored the idea of lifting excess ink with sheets of newsprint, thus accelerating the drying process and producing effective over-printing transparency. Continues below…

Within a few years, Green had a large body of work and began exhibiting widely. In 1959 he was elected to the Royal Society of Painter- Printmakers RE.

In 1959 Green left secondary teaching and was appointed as senior lecturer in the department of Art Teacher Training at Hornsey College of Art in North London. Working in an art school immediately gave him much more time for his printmaking compared to the constant demands of his time as a secondary school teacher. Shortly after joining Hornsey, he made his first visit to the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, initially to collect material for a projected series of articles on coal mining. He began producing large-scale lino and woodcuts based on the impact of the dramatic industrial landscape he discovered. This coincided with a series of prints of derelict farm implements abandoned in the landscape and a series of coastal prints and quarries which began to shape some of the imagery which was found in his later work.

In 1965 he was appointed Head of the Postgraduate Art Teacher Training Department at Hornsey and, at the same time, began a ten-year association (1965-75) with London Graphic Arts, producing regular monthly editions of large relief prints. He began exhibiting more widely and wrote his first book on printmaking, Creative Printmaking, published by Batsford in 1964. Followed in 1967 by a second publication, Surface Printmaking, also published by Batsford.

Along with his printmaking, Green’s work in education became more significant, and as Head of Department, he developed new courses in design education and began work as an external examiner and visiting lecturer. In the late 60s, he began travelling internationally both as a lecturer and short course director, visiting Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Japan and Malaysia, developing short courses and lecturing in all these countries. In addition, he had a one-person exhibition of his prints at the Malaysian National Gallery, while his many visits to Japan brought him into contact with Japanese printmakers through which he developed further some of his techniques in stencil printing. At this time, he was also appointed to the Crafts Council of Great Britain.

Meanwhile, Hornsey College of Art had merged with the Middlesex Polytechnic, later to become Middlesex University. Green was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Art and Design and published his book on design education, Problem Solving and Visual Experience, published Batsford 1974.

He was designated as Emeritus Professor in Art and Design and in 1988 appointed OBE for services to Art and Education. He took early retirement in 1993 to concentrate fully on his work as a printmaker. In 2007 he met Simon Lewin and began his ongoing working association with him and his St Jude’s Gallery, followed three years later by meeting Emma Mason of the Emma Mason Gallery, with whom he has also had a close working association since that date.

In 2000 his wife Linda also took early retirement from her arts administration work at Middlesex University. She began developing her own prints and working with Green on the ever-increasing number of short courses.

Throughout his working career, Peter Green had always seen printmaking as a collaborative process. Traditionally printmaking has sometimes tended to be a by-product of the joint work of the artist, block-maker and printer, with only the ‘artist’ getting to sign the print. His collaboration with his wife led to a series of prints on which they worked together with the prints jointly signed.

Two solo exhibitions of Green’s work at the Mascalls Gallery in Kent and the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh brought his work to a wider public, with more work now held in National collections and Museums, including the V&A Museum and the Welsh National Gallery in Cardiff. In 2017 St Judes Gallery published a book of Green’s work entitled Peter Green - The Workmanship of Uncertainty written by Nathaniel Hepburn. In 2021 St Jude’s included a selection of Green’s limited edition prints as part of their audio/print project, Transmissions / Volume One.

Examples of Green’s work in art education including articles, lecture notes and books, can be found at The National Arts Education Archive (NAEA) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park www.artsedarchive.org.uk