Portrait of Heather Green
17th June 2025.
I turned up to Thames-Side Studios to meet my friend Heather Green. It was hotter than hell, the sunlight blasting off the white warehouse buildings which glowed like a mirage by the riverside. Bad day to forget my sunglasses at home. Here comes Heather to the rescue, letting me inside before I got fried by sunstroke.
“Help yourself to some Haribo or warm orange juice there,” she offered in a lilting Redcar accent when we got up to her studio. The jellies had melted into a lurid mass which I ate in one go and washed down with bitterly warm orange juice.
Once I’d recovered from the intense illumination outside, detail of Heather’s studio leapt into my eyes at once. Sunlight poured with the smoothness of tea out a ceramic pot through two huge windows. You could turn on a lightbulb and it’d seem invisible. Every now and again Nine Inch Nails or Headache blared from a speaker on a desk. The large sheets of canvas covering the floor to catch paint looked like they had been used to wipe a rainbow’s tears. As I tiptoed over this dusty propagation of colour, I felt like I had stepped inside a painting. An impression amplified by the works in progress lining almost every wall. I knew Heather was one to paint multiple pieces at a time, yet I was stunned by their sheer numbers. You could seerather than hear the conversations between them. A whole galaxy of paint tubes was spread across a wheelie shelf in the corner. Another similar shelf bore a random abundance of supplies. From a forest of paint brushes, she picked two and wandered around the room in a tie-dye t-shirt tucked into denim shorts that matched the floor. Every now and again sunlight glinted off a small cross around her neck.
My first brush with Heather Green’s work was during a frosty November in 2024 when she made the shortlist for The Hari Art Prize and I had to install her painting for the exhibition. I was only slightly taller than her submission, Undergo the ritual to atone for sins. Sharp black strokes like eye-liner glide across a blushing shadow of pink and yellow. Out of this sensual iris stares out a hexagonal pupil, deep as the abyss. I just had to befriend someone who can paint like this and felt really honoured at this invitation to her studio.
With the thoughtful eyes and steady hand of a chemist, she worked away at this huge piece well over two metres across. Astral clouds of rust and ochre bloomed across the milky heavens. The colours had been applied against the pale grey background with such deftness that in places it looked like thick liquids resisting each other. The piece was still in its infancy; it’s visual ideas still in the process of coalescing like nebulous gas. This is her current commission, destined for a space with lots of black marble to complement its oxidised brilliance. She confesses that - with the time needed for the oils to dry - she’s cutting it a bit close to the deadline with this one. But then again, isn’t every artist? Her client wanted this done in the manner of one of her old paintings which presents a unique challenge for an artist who doesn’t conform to any explicit notions of style.
Tension vibrates off the surface of her paintings, each one so voluptuously chaotic. Some of them capture the carnivalesque blur of a thousand people dancing. Others unfurl like an explosion. A few make you feel like you’re bleeding out on the pavement. In every case, Heather’s brush is the baton with which she conducts this kaleidoscopic orchestra. Her tasteful use of colour and intensity lends each of her pieces such a distinct harmony. Form spontaneously emerges in her abstraction before disappearing again, only to appear elsewhere in the composition. A similar rhythm permeates between her paintings where motifs overlap each other like waves in the sea. Certain bits of visual expression will break through the surface for a couple of pieces before going under; maybe or never to emerge again. Hers is a practice guided by the unimpeded spirit of play and spontaneity; a reflection of how she’s feeling rather than who she is.
And as an artist who regularly reads the news, she’s feeling a lot of things. “I believe that painting is coloured by the metaphysical frameworks of emotions and information that surround the painter at work,” she says. It’s an artist’s nature to be in tune with the world around them. Even though I can see the Thames drifting past out the windows, everything beyond these walls might cease to exist once Heather’s embroiled in the throes of her work. She thus sticks her fingers in the zapping plug socket of the world to bring that fiendish energy into the studio and throw it all over her paintings. If the state of the world has any bearing on her work, that’d explain their frantic, almost grotesque direction lately.
In 63 Seconds to steal, blue blooms across the canvas like a gunshot through a white shirt. Then follows the thick arterial spray which spurts and drips out of this lethal entry wound. Red flags were ignored delivers the same kind of violence except through the medium of deep gashes, like craw-marks, running down the composition. Heather wanders to a stack of finished paintings in the corner, their spines labelled like books. She pulled out Endless Painful Viewing, saying, “This one’s a hideous painting.” I was looking at a crime scene. Up and down lost all meaning in this unidentifiable pool of grisly remains. A haemorrhage of black, yellow, and blue dribbled all over a magenta and green background. The swing of the weapon is documented by these sinister lines arching to and fro. My eyes could take the sight for only so long before they were confused by this colourful cacophony. When I asked about her distaste for this painting, she said it’s got a lot of elements that are unlike her. “Also I was vindicated in my hatred for it when I posted it on Instagram and literally no one engaged with it. My tutor during my BA said to me that sometimes you have to make shit paintings. So, this is my shit painting.” Despite her aversion, I was still transfixed by it.
These pieces look like the result of unbridled gestural frenzy. Alongside technical prowess, their visceral aesthetics can be attributed to reflecting a world knocked off its axis. Tragedy suddenly struck the arts last November with the untimely passing of painter Sarah Cunningham. Heather found herself in a torrent of grief upon the news of her dear friend and classmate’s death which rippled horribly throughout the RCA and beyond. “Obviously you don’t want this to happen to anyone,” she says heavily, “but for it to happen to someone who was so good and so generous and so kind. For an artist who was becoming very successful, she was very dedicated to her friendships and very humble about where she came from. At her Lisson solo show she’s talking to collectors but when she spots me and Taro [Heather’s partner] across the room she told them to excuse her as she came over to say hello. We were like ‘oh my gosh go talk to the collectors’ and she’d say ‘no, absolutely not, you’re the people who’ve come to support me for me.’ She’s everything I want to be as an artist.”
In her stickiest moments of existential despair, when the merciless grind of survival renders her creative pursuits particularly hopeless, Heather recalls similar conversations she’s had with Sarah during their first year. And each time, Sarah’s response comes as an ethereal voice reaching across immense gulfs of space, “We’ve just gotta do it! And then it’ll happen. And we’ll get it. And then we’ll just be able to paint, and that’s what we’re working towards.”
Like a tumbler of whiskey she refuses to drink, Heather was carrying a small pot full of this viscous, shimmering pink. She applies some energetic strokes of it to the commissioned piece then turns to me in frustration, “For ten years now I’ve been trying to crack this bloody pink wash and I still haven’t got it…” During the second year of her BA in Painting at the Wimbledon College of Arts, she managed to concoct a translucent pink mixture so precise it’s been nearly impossible to recreate. She chases the formula like a dragon through a dizzying number of combinations between linseed oil, dammar, and paint.
“I love the chemistry behind painting,” she says with a gleam in her eye brighter than the sun at noon. “My painter’s vocabulary has always involved pouring, staining, and reacting. These splatters over here,” she bids me towards a different canvas, “are just water and white spirit mix resisting the paint. There’s reactivity. When I was at the RCA I’d have artists coming up to me to ask how I’ve made this or that specific mark, because I’ve spent so much time doing reactions, and not enough time painting.
But the fizzing, bubbling, swirling nature of Heather’s practice is such that a reaction once achieved defies replication after. Same applies to the gestural aspects of her painting. Anyone who’s tried to recreate a splatter or dripping effect knows the folly. Just how do you determine the movement of paint droplet through the air? She guides rather than controls the paint because chaos cannot be controlled. But it can be tested. She always has a tester canvas on the go where she experiments with tricky marks before making them on whatever piece she’s working on. The dislocated essence of multiple paintings flow through that canvas. Some of her works start off life as a tester or an old unfinished piece. She covered one in gesso to start afresh but noticed that overtime the oil in the pigments underneath had seeped through like a memory reaching out of the past. Thus no one can convince me that paintings aren’t alive; which explains why artists rarely feel in control of the decisions they make in their work, even if they’re trying to undo them. Some of the most interesting motifs in Francis Bacon’s paintings come from him wiping the paint off the canvas with a filthy rag. But the removal of paint – such a basic action – isn’t part of Heather’s painterly lexicon as she simply paints over whatever doesn’t sit right with her.
That doesn’t stop her from obsessing over details though. If anything, the fact that so many processes in her work are autonomous only inflames that obsession. “But I can’t help it,” she shrugs, “because I look at stuff. So much of my painting time is spent staring.” Which is why she rarely documents the process on her Instagram because staring at a canvas for 45 minutes at a time would look weird on the timelapse. Art seldom comes out willingly when every choice feels like an unresolvable paradox. The real work is done during those gruelling impasses when neither creator nor creation lands a blow. “But when you do realise what you need to do to it,” Heather says, “that’s the best bit. But that’s what I mean when I say painting is so emotional. It’s a deep drive and when I don’t do it, I’m not the kind of person I enjoy being.”
“It keeps you sane,” I commented.
“Or it keeps me a little bit insane.”
Unless your parents are loaded, becoming an artist is a conscious decision to run at a loss financially. I guess every business has to operate in the red for some time before it can turn a profit, eh? But the art world isn’t known for being accessible, to large parts of both its audience and practitioners. As I spotted countless variegations of art supplies around Heather’s studio, I saw the strenuous financial demands of her craft. Every day off is worth its moments in gold to an artist working a full-time job to pay for their studio. After months of not being able to paint enough, suddenly all these commissions have been dropped on Heather who feels like she’s so back! But if she ever misses any studio time because she’s exhausted from her day-job, guilt ensues. Under such conditions, it’s easy for artists who don’t come from privileged backgrounds to feel like they don’t belong in the art world. Despite the imposter syndrome, Heather doesn’t feel excluded from the act of painting. It transports her to a place where she doesn’t have to do anything other than paint. This is the same place inhabited by the audience who are blissfully lost in a painting, who don’t have to do anything but look. And this euphoria must be made more accessible. If art imitates life, it belongs everywhere.
A hospital, for example. They’re healing yet difficult places to be in where mortality is put into question. Heather’s 2017 solo show at the Royal Marsden Hospitals of Chelsea and Sutton sought to bring art into such spaces. A bright explosion of cosmic chemicals washing over sacred geometry provided respite against the sterile walls. “There’s something really beautiful,” she reflected, “about something else happening at a hospital that isn’t pain or suffering or treatment.” It’s important to her that her work be accessible to normal people going about their daily lives. If life can’t be mediated through a gallery space, then why confine art to it? This sentiment comes across in Heather’s choice of a non-traditional exhibition space if she had the opportunity to show anywhere. “On the beach,” she says, “easels stuck in the sand, waves crashing underneath them, sun blasting down on the paintings.”
Catching onto her vision, I added, “You’d need the easels to be pretty high up so the tide doesn’t catch the paintings. They’d also need to be fastened down against the wind and protected from the salt spray. But doesn’t seem impossible.”
The upper echelons of the art world is structured in a self-sufficient way where the patronage of those within it will keep it going for quite some time. But it’s a stale echo chamber where rich artists, gallerists, and investors are screaming into the void. The weapons manufacturer building a new wing in a gallery near you cares little for what art means. But even in the non-institutionalised parts of the art world inhabited by regular people, you’ll see the same faces at private views and everyone speaks the same cultural dialect. Though delectable ideas are being exchanged, it’s harder for outside influences to break in spontaneously; such is the nature of every creative community. Which is why Heather is so keen for people outside of an artistic background engaging with art.
Institutional elitism has instilled the misconception that people need a knowledge of the arts to understand what they’re seeing. “Who gives a shit if you don’t have an art history degree?” hissed Heather. “Looking is intuitive.” Before art history was codified into distinct movements, people back in the day could refer to nothing other than the artwork in front of them, relying on naked perception. Similarly, when people outside of the arts are allowed to engage with it and form opinions free from the conceptual baggage of the artist, it enriches the cultural discourse. Sometimes it’s just as simple as what you do or don’t like…
When Heather was eight, her family bought a computer and the first thing she did was Ask Jeeves her name. The first result was heathergreen.com – a black webpage bearing her name in a lime green font. Nothing else. Her delight was infectious. Twelve years later when she was setting up her artist website, the domain name she wanted - heathergreen.com - was still taken. If a website is left inactive for eight years, someone can put in a bid to take its domain name; which is exactly what Heather did. However when the owner of the website was notified of Heather’s bid, he simply changed the website colours to a pastel pink background with black text…
Heather approached the commissioned piece inquisitively and held up a colour palette test against it. “I’ve used a lot more ochre than I said I would…” she pointed out before counteracting it with a lighter shade, the pigments led by a will of their own once they were on the canvas. It is this will that seduces Heather because while she’s in the act of applying paint no other considerations are going through her head other than how they interact with each other, like two forces. It’s only when she steps back does her imagination step in to form an image.
As I left Heather’s studio and walked towards Woolwich station under a low-riding sun, amidst visions of Haribos melting into paint was a queer thought that I couldn’t put down. Just like Heather’s translucent pink wash, we’re all running after some personal ideal which we can’t quite crack. Maybe it’s a vision of who we want to be or some kind of perfection once attained long ago. But perfection doesn’t exist; it’s a self-imposed illusion we use as an excuse to stay in pursuit. And most of us know beforehand that the chase will be never-ending and a part of us knows that the thing isn’t even out there; yet we do it anyway. I guess it’s better than doing nothing. So, what is your translucent pink wash?
