Breaking Barriers: Art by Lance Green

Soirée is honored to be featuring a solo exhibition titled “Breaking Barriers” with works by Lance Green from January through March 2014. “Breaking Barriers” will feature works that are a departure from some of the mediums Lance is known for and will vary in size. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 11th from 5:00 to 8:00pm.

Admission to the opening reception is free, the art is sensational and the wine/craft beer/cocktail menu a delight to explore! The Spotlight Gallery at Soirée is designed to offer artists the opportunity to present solo exhibitions and the public the opportunity to immerse themselves in a body of work created by one artist.

ARTIST STATE OF MIND IN CREATION
Lance is a Colorist and an Expressionist. But more than that, he is a storyteller. Many of his works are a self portrait of sorts, but all are universal in their application, expressing the human paradox of grace and despair. There is a dark whimsy, an anxious optimism in the work that somehow speaks a secret language that brings one to rest deeply in the sound conviction of a redemption of all things.

“There came a point in my life last year where I took a good look at everything in my life – work, relationships, definitions I’d accepted about myself and characterizations that others imposed on me that either weren't even true or had simply become worn out and no longer served me. In ways it did affect and limit my work. This work is simply and throwing off of former limitations and accepted ways of doing things,” says Lance.

“Kali (Hindu Goddess) destroys so that she may create, and with one sweeping gesture she came in years ago bringing havoc and destruction, and now with another sweeping gesture she brings newness – a shunning of old ways and old stories and a new way of seeing and living life – and with it new and enlarged ways of working. the variety of work comes from an act of grace in my life that has allowed me to shed skins that I’ve outgrown and live and work in a creative realm that is breaking boundaries in every way.”

ARTIST BACKGROUND
Lance was born in Denver in 1953 and was raised there until age nine. For the next few years he moved around the Southwest with his mother and stepfather, living in the high country of the Colorado Rockies, the Texarkana Bayou and the Deserts of New Mexico and Arizona where he became immersed in Native Art and Culture.

During the summers Lance lived with his father and stepmother, Norwegian abstract painter Chris Christopherson, who taught him to paint and was also a big influence in his love of art, especially Modern Art. As a teen his family settled in the East Los Angeles area where they remained throughout his high school and college years. It was there that he developed his love of Latin Art and Culture and where his high school art teacher Linda Stevens, took an interest in him and gave him the instruction and guidance needed to set his life course as an artist. He majored in Fine Arts at Rio Hondo College and went on to be a fixture in the South Bay Los Angeles art scene until his return to Colorado in 2004. He now resides and paints in his home studio there.

In the late 1990s Lance did a series of intensive one on one workshops with the late contemporary Master Fritz Scholder. Other influences include the San Francisco Figurative Expressionists, Gaugin, Cezanne, Kandinsky, Klee, the Fauves, De Kooning, Basquait,
and the Latin Masters. Influences aside, Lance Green is a pioneer in the world of contemporary painting, exploring worlds previously uncharted.