Pretty soon, artist Tom Green will lose the calluses on his right hand, which he got from years of painting his big canvases on the studio floor.
Sooner or later, he will probably lose the function of his hands altogether. They already seize up badly if he goes outside, and the muscles in his forearms occasionally twitch uncontrollably.
Maryland artist Tom Green has been painting since 1965, but will soon lose control of his motor skills. Green has Lou Gehrig's disease but continues to paint.
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He thinks he has some time. How much, he’s not sure.
Green, 69, the acclaimed Maryland painter of wondrous hieroglyphic and semiabstract art, has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — Lou Gehrig’s disease, named for the famous baseball player whose life it claimed in 1941.
It is a terminal neurological illness that gradually robs the body of its motor skills. It takes away, in many cases, the ability to walk, talk, stand and even eat, while leaving the brain and senses intact.
It could eventually take Green’s ability to paint, something he has done for most of his life.
And it comes as he is at the top of his form.
“I really feel like I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done,” he said. “In command of my materials, and . . . a kind of conceptual language that I’m comfortable with.”
Now he confronts the climax of a life spent exploring the accidental and intentional in art, with the reality and timing of his death.
“Most people don’t know when they’re going to die,” he said. “I know sort of when I’m going to die. . . . Time is of the essence now.”
“In some ways I’m relieved, because I don’t want to grow old and infirm,” he said. “So I see this as an opportunity to die, which I don’t mind.”
Green, who taught at Washington’s Corcoran College of Art and Design for 40 years, has a unique artistic voice, said Jack Rasmussen, director of the American University Museum, which played host to an exhibit of his art this year.
“He comes a little bit out of the Washington color school,” Rasmussen said of the abstract color painters of the 1960s who were the area’s “first, and only, grab at national attention.”
“He was never really a part of it, but it’s obviously an influence,” he said. Green “always stayed figurative, even at his most abstract. There’s always elements from the natural world — water, trees, sun.”
Over two days last month, Green, his eyeglasses propped up on his head, ambled around his rustic house and adjoining studio in Cabin John, where even the paint-splashed plywood floor is art, and talked about his life, his work and his coming demise.
He appears thin now, compared with a photo taken three years ago. His wife, Linda, said he recently lost 25 pounds. And his black Italian motorcycle sits unused beneath a green tarp in the yard.
But he still has his thick, boyish-looking hair, a sly grin and lots of ideas.
He said he does not think his impending death will influence his art. It might “seep” in here and there, he said.
But he can’t really force himself to address the subject: That would be unnatural — “like an assignment,” he said later.
As for the future, he said he plans to work on a smaller scale. He said he has also been reviewing older paintings he started years ago and realizing, “Oh, my God, I never finished that.”
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