Biography

Michal David Green has always lived near the Pacific coast. He spends several days a week walking the beach, collecting natural artifacts that he gilds and enhances with fine gold, transforming them into what he reveres as totems, talismans and sculpture. He is particularly drawn to wood that reveals its history in growth patterns and natural forms, which his gilding

techniques accentuate, defining the allure and mystery found in driftwood. Michal has an ability

to recognize and reveal sculptural form within a piece of driftwood, and through sensitive technique, reveal it as art.

Mr. Green was born and raised in Tacoma, WA, where he spent his free time exploring the Olympic rainforests, the Cascade mountains, and the Puget Sound. There, he began collecting elements of nature and began experimenting with art forms, especially painting, capturing in oil and watercolor the natural patterns found in living things. He also began his lifelong study of art, artists, philosophy and history, with a focus on the classical. At age 19, he moved to Laguna Beach, where he worked as a custom furniture designer before turning his talents to fashion. After a move to San Francisco in 1981, he began a career as a fashion designer from 1976 to 1992, during that time he continued to paint and sculpt, developing and refining the techniques that form the foundation for his art. The fact that these works are fragments of something important, larger and once living, should remind us of our own vulnerability and the imperative to be good stewards of our earth.

Email Table Asia Gallery

Seeing figures, faces and such in the convolutions of living or dead trees and thus evoking mysteries and mythologies clearly has a primordial origin and continues today in Michal David Green’s work with driftwood.

“By rain, the violence of river and seawater, voracious organisms, rocks, sand, the pounding surf, and time, nature carves away the fragments of trees and sends them to join the flotsam and drift across waterways and beaches. Revealed are the intricate growth patterns of a crenellated matrix, the borders of lamellae, the resilience of the a1bumum or other tegument grain, rich in pitch.

Trees suffer wounds but sustain themselves, healing juices are sent to mend and a scar develops. This cicatrix, the intersection between branch and body, the stump where the juices have pooled, this hardwood is what is destined to remain continent and survive.

In Olympia, the fifth century B.C.E. Greek sculptor Pheidias provided his countrymen with a figure of Zeus that became one of the wonders of the ancient world. Its surface was covered in gold and ivory. Chryselephantine became the word for this particular technique.

Chryselephantine driftwood / I honor this new life this strange new beauty with gold, silver, copper and with these enhancements I hope to illuminate nature's path. These are my votives, my talismans and totems, holy remnants reminding us of a past life where they once were giants.”                             -Michal David Green

Home   Art   Tables   About   Contact   Press  Portfolio  Events