“In a world full of AI rubbish, I made this painting with the wonders of my own mind.” This sentence from an Instagram Reel stops me mid-scroll. Nineteen-year-old Naya Green then turns her canvas around. Her oil painting is a feverish, hallucinatory tangle of musicians. A flautist’s fingers are multiplying in a frenzied glitch, a violin bow stuttering across the strings in a dozen directions, a horn player’s face screwed tight, cheeks ballooning, veins writhing as he braces himself to unleash a colossal blast through his wind instrument.
My eyes start to swivel as I continue scrolling through her feed, deeper into a labyrinth of dense paintings, each one pulsing with an almost electrical current, which is fitting since that’s exactly what Green calls them. Her “electrical” paintings are intricate, fantastical, maniacal colors vibrating off the canvas like a television caught between two stations. She says she’s trying to “distort the frequency of time and show the raw visage of emotions, the fluctuation of goodness, truth, and falsity.” The paintings are about “grief, and sorrow, and love, and the lack thereof.” She paints “people, gremlins, horrors. The feeling when you’re walking around in the commercial world and you think: A m I just a flat envelope sailing into nothingness? “
Green says she’s Van Gogh’s sister. Ask what she wants and she skips the gallery talk entirely. She wants a cathedral to convert into a museum. She wants humanity to embrace the strange wonders of the mind, and stop conforming to the societal strictures that numb creativity. At a time when the future feels bleak and younger generations are worn thin by the instability of the world, it’s inspiring to watch Green do what she describes herself doing: turning the highs and lows of her own mind into the very thing that gets her through them.
We speak over Zoom. It’s 9 a.m. in rural Georgia. Green is calling from her childhood home on a hill at the end of a mile-long driveway, from the bedroom that’s now her studio. She’s just woken up.
SOFIA HALLSTRÖM: When did you first start painting?
NAYA GREEN: It’s surprising to say I haven’t been painting long at all. I dropped out of college a semester ago, and that’s really when I started. Almost all of my paintings were done in a short amount of time because I work very quickly. I’m at an absurd place in my life. I’m 19, living at my parents’ house because they’re letting me, and my studio is just my room. It’s huge, and it’s completely filled with paintings and sculptures. Walking in feels like walking through tunnels of paintings, there are so many. I’m saving up for the cathedral project, hopefully in the future. I’m leaving for a residency in five days to a strange, eccentric art farm in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. I’m self-employed, and that’s all I do every day. I hope to move out this year. I don’t want to live with my parents forever.
HALLSTRÖM: What made you drop out of college, and why did you start painting?
GREEN: We were doing very dull modern art at college. Modern sculpture, work with cement and cinder blocks, even rock carving, which I had no interest in. I really didn’t fit in there. I had this huge dream, and whenever I want something, I’m going to get it by any means. If you’re a dreamer or an artist, it’s hard to put yourself into something that just can’t contain you.
HALLSTRÖM: You talk about going into manic states and channeling the mysteries of the mind into your paintings. Can you talk us through your process and how you get into that flow state?
GREEN: The manic highs are explosive. There’s no telling what’s going to happen. I have to not see anybody for fourteen days straight. I don’t get much sleep as my mind is firing on all cylinders, going wild. A painting comes to me as visions assimilating, clustering together like a big nebula, and then I formulate that. It takes all my strength, so I have to be in complete solitude. One of my favorite painters, Andrew Wyeth , couldn’t let anybody watch him paint as it’s too personal, too intimate. I don’t let anyone see it either. Someone filmed me painting once and it terrified me, like watching every move I make. I’d say I enter a different realm of consciousness, a higher fog above the whole atmosphere of everything. If anyone comes in, it throws me off completely, like being pulled out of a vortex. I was painting the other day and my friend walked in, and I fell right off my stool! I was in such a different headspace.
I’ve recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is intrinsic to my work. It affects the whole emotional landscape. In the lows, I can’t move for two or three weeks. I can’t paint in the lows. It’s only in the highs that I make the paintings.
HALLSTRÖM: In your videos, you often say that you don’t do drugs. You’ve quoted Dalí’s famous saying, “I am the drugs.” Is painting something you do to survive the feeling of the highs, or to get through it?
GREEN: Painting is definitely a way through. I say that I don’t do drugs a lot because I love that phrase. I think we can be the drugs for ourselves. This life is so bizarre, tingling with molecules and inspiration. If you’re going to be an artist, it’s necessary to realize you don’t need that. If you look into your own mind, that’s enough to get you through. A lot of people assume I’m joking about it, but I just say no.
When you’re in the low, it feels like you’ve died off the planet Earth, like you’re under the surface of the sidewalk and humanity is walking over you. When you awaken from that, it’s almost like you have to make up for the time you were in your grave, like being raised from it. I’ve had tangible moments, driving down the road to do an errand, where I realize I’m being raised from the grave again, ascending out of that very low, deep-down place. Right when I get that signal, I think, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to paint again.” And that’s usually when I go and create a huge painting. It’s almost like you have to make up for the life you lost, like you owe the divine order an explanation.
HALLSTRÖM: What’s the feeling like once that’s over? Is it something you can carry into another painting, or is it out of your control?
GREEN: At the beginning of a painting, you feel great, and by the end, you’re like a dying tree falling over. I finished a painting five days ago that took maybe seventeen days. The whole time, I barely slept, didn’t brush my hair, didn’t change clothes or move much. By the end, my body was all crumpled up, like a dying person. But I was glad it was done. It’s very hard to look at a two-dimensional surface all day long. It really depends on how long the painting takes.
HALLSTRÖM: You call them electrical paintings. When did you start calling them that?
GREEN: A couple of months ago. Everything I was going for was about movement. Electricity felt like a poetic metaphor, since it’s an energy created by the movement of particles. I’m fascinated by the idea that there’s an electricity between humans, between intellect, in the psychological interaction of people. Human interaction feels charged with something. It’s the whole experience of being alive, almost. It was really about momentum, movement, a source of energy in all of us. And I don’t use electrical outlets or anything like that in the paintings themselves.
HALLSTRÖM: In your biography on your website, you write beautifully about things that don’t fit “the social hexagon” in a world “ripe for you to devour in exploration of the meaning of everything.” Can you tell us more about that idea?
GREEN: It’s been complicated for me, because in the circles and societies I’ve been in, I felt like all the brightest parts of me were severed. I know we’re not meant to be islands cut off from everything, but what I’m trying to do is escape the pattern of conformity I see in society, the way even the internet and modern life try to make you so much smaller than you are. I wasn’t prepared to minimize the infinity of my soul. In society, in a job, you have to act a certain way and be there at a certain time. But I want people to understand you can have more power over yourself than you think, to do the things your mind wants to do. Everything I saw in society was so much duller than it could be. A lot of my work is about the fact that we could be so much more than we are. I wanted to create an imaginary land where people could be as bizarre as they actually are. People don’t know the grandeur or the extensiveness of their own mind. I want them to.
HALLSTRÖM: Is that something you think a lot of people in your generation feel, especially coming out of school and being told to conform a certain way, to get a job, to build a stable life?
GREEN: I’ve always felt that we’re these infinite, almost angelic beings. Even in high school, I never cared about being part of something that stifles you, that makes you grayer than you actually are. I think people make themselves so gray, when we’re full of all these colors. I just want to be bright red. I want to be the heart of things.
HALLSTRÖM: You have such a poetic way with words. Do you have a favorite word or phrase right now?
GREEN: I always ask people, “Tell me your favorite word in sound, in essence,” because you can love the sound of one word. I love the way “fantastical” sounds, and “eternity.” A lot of people don’t want to be here forever, but I think it’s so amazing that everything in this world is going to end soon, like the trees dying and seasons ending. That word feels hopeful, like there’s something beyond all this, something that lasts longer than our tangible selves. I also love the sound of “vermillion.” It’s a painting color I use a lot in my paintings, a mix between red and orange.
HALLSTRÖM: Who are the figures that appear in your paintings?
GREEN: Some are people I know, some come from photographs. There’s a painting called Ain’t No Rock Gonna Cry in My Place , and the man playing the flute in it is a real flute player. I saw his face, the light coming through his eyes, and thought, “That’s brilliant.” Usually, I’ll see a face somewhere, a photo of someone, and think, “That’s going to be the next one.”
HALLSTRÖM: What music are you listening to right now?
GREEN: I listen to so much. Venetian Snares are wild. I don’t even know how to describe their music, but it sounds like my mind. Lots of instruments going at the same time. It’s very comforting to me.
HALLSTRÖM: Tell us about the cathedral project. You want to buy a cathedral and turn it into a museum.
GREEN: Yes. I don’t even know where it’s going to be yet, but I’m hoping to get it by the end of this year. It came from realizing, quickly, that there’s no place for me in society. Not even spatially, not mentally. I thought, if I’m going to survive, I need to create a place where I’m mentally able to do whatever I want. I used to always say, “I’m going to create this wonderland.” I like to find eccentric people for inspiration. There’s an old man who lives near my house with a little art castle, a tiny shack covered in paintings on the ceilings and walls, mosaics everywhere. It inspired me so much. I thought, “I’m going to do that in my own way.” If you’re ever in the US you can come visit my museum!
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