Spontaneity and style

I CAME upon Mitzie Green’s paintings quite by chance when I recently visited the Copper Beech Gallery in Little Wymondley. Adorning one wall was a collection of beautiful watercolour flowers but it was not the subject matter or medium that caught my eye – it was the execution. The floral subjects looked almost melted against the paper, the petals soft and dripping and this, I was to learn, was Mitzie’s style.
Mitzie openly admits she had a very strict upbringing and this is perhaps one of the reasons her art is very unrestricted. ‘I like the spontaneous approach,’ says Mitzie ‘and I like to use watercolours because they flow and can be unpredictable.’ She also uses acrylics and light mediums and adds water to them so they can flow freely and create accidents and surprises in her work. Mitzie is comfortable painting without direction, allowing her work to form from a creative impulse rather than a rigid formula and is content to try different techniques and styles.
As an artist, Mitzie is no stranger to other artistic methods, she has spent the last ten years painting a variety of different subjects from flowers, townscapes and abstract art using different mediums including collage, watercolours and acrylics but also drawing on her background as a stitch textile artist and a potter before that. Mitzie has a City & Guilds in Creative Embroidery and then studied Stitched Textiles at the College of Art in St Albans, from which she has a National Diploma, and a BA Hons in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Hertfordshire.
Mitzie combines knowledge and skill with a lot of creative imagination and draws on her life skills as a keen gardener to create her flower paintings, while drawing on her travel experiences for her townscapes and landscapes. Although resident in Berkhamsted for the past 20 years, before that Mitzie travelled with her husband when he worked for the railways but now she is clearly settled in Hertfordshire. Her work is not an unknown quantity as she has exhibited widely in numerous galleries and exhibitions in the county and at some other quite renowned galleries in London. Closer to home her work can be seen at Shanti, Kings Langley; Berkeley, Berkhamsted; Graphics Plus, St Albans; the Copper Beech Gallery, Little Wymondley, and further afield at the Obsidian, Stoke Mandeville. Since 1997 she has taken part in the annual Hertfordshire Open Studios event, in September, and will this year take part in Bedfordshire Open Studios in June.
And while Mitzie is quite content with her current workload, she is considering offering private tuition but not until she returns from a visit to Budapest, which she is very much looking forward to for inspiration and the opportunity to paint a few scenes of this interesting city.

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