Figure in Green

Clinton Adams

"Figure in Green" is illustrated as figure 72 in Jules Heller's 'Printmaking Today', page 71. Heller notes about this image:

"Figure 72 is completely traditional in its execution, having been made entirely with lithographic crayon... A distant descendant of Cubism, with Surrealistic affinities, Adams created this as one of a series concerned with ambiguous references to the female nude within an abstract context. The atmospheric depth of the composition reflects his interest in a metamorphic relationship that links the landscape of the American Southwest to the forms of the figure."

Adams commented to Robert P. Conway regarding this image for the catalogue raisonné:

"This is a very close relative of 'Figure in Yellow'. The only difference between the two prints is color, and it seems to me that here the green sits much better against this olive than the yellow did on the browns in the other print. This is the stronger of the two."

This image was done using four aluminum plates and one stone, inked sequentially in gray, again in gray, in green, in violet-blue and again in green.

Adams was born in Glendale, California on December 11, 1918. He earned a B.A. in education and a M.A. in 1942 from the University of California Los Angeles and began teaching there in 1946. He also taught at the Otis Art Institute and went on to head the art departments at both the University of Kentucky and the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Adams was introduced to Lynton Kistler in 1948 and began producing lithographs in his commercial print shop in Los Angeles. In 1959, he joined forces with artist June Wayne and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop was founded in Los Angeles in 1960 with Adams as associate director. He moved to Albuquerque in 1961 after accepting the position as dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Tamarind moved to Albuquerque in 1970 and Adams became the Institute's director—a position he held for fifteen years. Adams' work is held in permanent collections through the United States and abroad.