William Green

right|frameless William Green (1934 – 28 January 2001) was a British who achieved attention in the late 1950s as a practitioner of Action painting. His work became known following a documentary film featuring his creation paintings by riding a bicycle over a surface saturated with bitumen. From about 1965, Green withdrew from the art scene as a reaction to negative publicity. He resumed his work in 1995. One of his works is in Tate Modern.

Early life

Green was born in Greenwich, London, in 1934. After leaving school he worked in the drawing office of an architect in Sidcup, Kent. He then studied at Sidcup School of Art from 1952 to 1954, and there he made his first use of bitumen paint after discovering an old tin in his garden shed.

Later life

By 1965, Green had withdrawn completely from the art scene, to some extent as a result of negative publicly his work had attracted. His brief marriage had ended in the early 1960s and his son had been adopted by his ex-wife's new husband.

Green returned to Sidcup in 1967 where he worked full-time at Havering Technical College until 1981 when he retired from teaching. When a student asked if he was the same William Green that he had read about in a book on Pop Art, he replied enigmatically "William Green is a very common name."

In 1995, Green started to paint again, taking up where he left off many years before. His first new works were made on paper, but he soon ordered large sheets of board and cans of bitumen and began to work outside the house, incorporating the effects of rain and fire on the surfaces of his black paintings. The results were shown at The Susan Hayward Exhibition at England & Co in London in 1993. Green was also featured in an exhibition at the Barbican in 1993, The Sixties Art Scene in London, and in the book of the same title. The BBC made a documentary about Green for The Late Show that was shown around the same time.

Green continued to paint every day and systematically sawed up and destroyed almost all his furniture and house contents, with the resulting debris incorporated in vast black bitumen-covered paintings. A group of these late works was exhibited in the Gardner Arts Centre at Sussex University in 1999, where he had been the subject of a previous exhibition, in 1964.

Green died on 28 January 2001, aged 66 or 67.