Printmaker: Rona Green

Rona Green is a Geelong born, Melbourne-based printmaker who over the past decade has developed her own very particular and distinctive pictorial language.

She has created her own personalised bestiary which could be termed “teddies with attitude”. She employs most of the printmaking mediums – relief prints, etchings, screenprints, lithographs and digital printmaking. She loves the stark clarity of the linocut or screenprint as well as the creative freedom of the digital print or monotype to create these very emphatic and expressive images. Her beasties frequently bear tattoos, wear specific costumes and carry the scars of their rites of passage. She has codified an artistic language which draws on cartoons, stencils and street graffiti, but which has become exclusively her own.

Her prints are incredibly seductive images, funky in their aesthetic and slightly menacing and confronting in their presence. Yet for all their light heartedness, they do hint at a secondary role as social commentary with a generous dose of satire and the absurd. I suspect that each of us will bring to Rona Green’s images our own emotional and cultural baggage.

While possibly born of the artist’s own love of animals, her personifications hint at cruelty and at nature striking back. Perhaps some of these animals wish to say “ toys aren’t us”.

In the last few years she has been the recipient of several art prizes for printmaking and has had her prints acquired by a number of public collections including the National Gallery of Australia and Chiang Mai Contemporary Art Museum, Thailand.

Rona Green is represented by Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney; Port Jackson Press in Melbourne; Impressions on Paper Gallery in Canberra and Adele Boag Gallery in Adelaide. Prices for her prints vary between $300 and $2,000.

Sasha Grishin

published in ‘Australian Art Collector’
Issue 37 July – September 2006

Lagomorphia
2005, sugarlift, aquatint and white ground
38 x 28 cm, edition 40
published by Port Jackson Press
photography: Olympia Szilagyi