On a former US airbase turned arts centre where a soundproofed hangar built to test fighter planes is now used for video shoots and album pre-production, and a diverse community of artists, writers and musicians rent workspaces, Jelly Green is making coffee in the large communal kitchen. ‘I feel very lucky to have a space at the Old Jet, it’s one of the main reasons I wanted to live in Suffolk again,’ she says. Her studio is all paint-spattered walls and encrusted surfaces, oil paints piled in an old ammunition box bought at a car boot sale when she was 14, and those idiosyncratic collections of objects amassed by artists the world over. 

There are several large scale paintings at various stages of development. Dreamily lit forest backgrounds are overlaid with lush foliage, meandering vines and gnarled branches that appear to pulsate with life, vividly rendered in shades of green and brown as distinct from one another as the greys and whites of the Suffolk seascapes painted by Green’s mentor, Maggi Hambling. The physical and emotional intensity of Green’s canvases are reminiscent of Hambling’s work and also bring to mind the paintings of Cecily Brown, another of Hambling’s proteges, but her emotional responsiveness to the natural world stems from a profound connection to nature that began in childhood. 

Born in Ipswich, Green moved to Melbourne, Australia, with her family at 4 months old and lived there until she was seven. ‘Just getting off the plane, you smell Australia, the Eucalyptus trees, the red earth. We used to go out into the country with my dad, on big hikes to Hanging Rock and through the Australian Bush.’ On their return to rural Suffolk, Green’s parents moved the family into an old chapel, ‘very draughty, toads coming through in the summer,’ and encouraged their three children to explore. ‘You could go as far as you felt comfortable as a kid and I think that freedom was really special. It definitely affected the way I live amongst nature, I am drawn to it.’ 

The children were also set free inside their home. ‘Our kitchen was painted in two stripes of yellow and blue. My mum bought us some paints and said, “go crazy.” We painted an underwater scene with a beach scene on top. It’s awful when I look back at the photographs,’ Green laughs, ‘but it was really important to have grown up in a house that encouraged the arts. I can’t imagine I’d be doing this if I’d had to battle my parents on wanting to be a painter.’ 

When Green was 15, Maggi Hambling came to dinner, invited by Green’s mother, who had written an article about her for a local paper.  ‘Maggi asked to see my work and wanted to know if I was serious about painting. I said that it was my passion but who knew what the future held – I was so young.’  Astonishingly, given Green’s age, Hambling suggested she join her renowned weekly life drawing class at Morley College in south east London. With the help of her ‘amazing’ art teacher, Green persuaded her school to release her for one day a week and took the train to her first six-hour class, aged 16, ‘absolutely terrified. Everyone was so much older than me – I think the oldest person at the time was a lady called Henderson who was 90.’ 

Hambling was late, so Green sat down and began to draw the naked woman in the middle of the room. ‘Maggi comes and in and shouts “Stand up child!” because you’re not supposed to sit. She says you have to stand up to let the subject come through your body and onto the page.’ Green found the first few months daunting. ‘There was a crit every three weeks and I was so nervous, but Maggi explained that caring what people think is simply being vain and that’s not why you’re painting. You’re painting in order to channel the truth and you learn far more from doing a bad painting than a good one.’ 

Morley College was ‘the best thing I’ve ever done,’ she says, ‘and I’m still there, 12 years later, every Thursday.’ Apart from a year at The Royal Drawing School, Green has not attended a traditional art school. ‘I went to lots of open days, but it was all very conceptual and I knew that I wanted to paint.’ At seventeen she began to travel, sketchbook in hand, starting with Nepal and covering most of South East Asia.  The trips were a way of dealing with the chronic asthma that dogged Green’s childhood and always got worse in April, but their effect on her work was palpable and she decided to go for longer, with a backpack full of paints.

‘I was living in Brighton, totally uninspired, and found myself on my laptop at 4am, looking for an artists’ retreat somewhere with no internet, no distractions. Three months later, I was up a tree in Brazil.’ The Brazilian rainforest is often described as ‘the lungs of the earth,’ but the synchronicity of ending up there because she had difficulty breathing only occurred to her later. ‘Maggi always says don’t choose your subject, let your subject choose you, and I guess that’s what happened.’

For eight weeks, Green woke up and went to bed with the sun. Days drawing in the forest were punctuated by the sight of a tree frog leaping on leaf or birds ‘I could never have imagined existing.’ Nights in her treehouse were interrupted by visits from a peanut-headed lantern fly ‘in the shape of a monkey-nut with huge wings and massive eyes,’ and myriad giant moths, toads, snails and spiders. Unfazed by these encounters, Green’s only real brush with danger came in the form of a bite from a tiny caterpillar. ‘My arm started to ache, my veins went a deep purple, I was 18k from the nearest town with no car. Luckily, there was one other person around, a Woofer* who managed to get a signal on her phone and called a guy who’d given her a lift a few weeks before.’ 

“imagine you’re an ant crawling over the model’s body and you’ll find the curves. It’s the same when painting a landscape. As an ant crawling through the spaces, you carve your way through to find the beyond”

Green recovered on antibiotics and continued to work, ‘living off porridge, breathing the best air.’ Hambling’s life class came in useful: ‘She’d say, imagine you’re an ant crawling over the model’s body and you’ll find the curves. It’s the same when painting a landscape. As an ant crawling through the spaces, you carve your way through to find the beyond.’ Green has since been on solo painting trips to Borneo, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Costa Rica, as well as spending another 2 months in the Brazilian Rainforest, and she is painfully aware of the catastrophic effect of climate change and deforestation on these places. ‘I can’t just paint homages to the jungle,’ she explains, ‘I’ve got to do anything I can do to help.’

“I can’t just paint homages to the jungle…I’ve got to do anything I can do to help”

To this end, Green contacted REGUA, a charity based outside Rio, near the Atlantic Rainforest, one of the most threatened eco-systems on earth, and offered to donate £9,000, a percentage of profits from her last show, held at London’s Oxo Tower. ‘REGUA has 4 missions: they educate, they buy up the land, plant trees and research.’  The charity was able to buy 62 acres of rainforest with the funds Green donated and they ‘sometimes send me videos of them walking through it, which is lovely.’  

“It’s not just about what you’re looking at, it’s about how you’re feeling. Sitting there in that moment painting the truth is very important”

Back in the UK, Green found that she saw things differently. ‘I’d be walking through an English woodland noticing the curl on an Oak leaf or the bend in a branch and realised I’d never looked at my own landscape this way.’ Her most recent series of paintings began last year with a visit to a Dorset wood. ‘It’s still so vivid. I can smell the wild garlic and the bluebells.’ Green sketches and paints in situ, going out at least once a week with her paint box in Suffolk and says she could never work from photographs because, ‘It’s not just about what you’re looking at, it’s about how you’re feeling. Sitting there in that moment painting the truth is very important. It might rain, it’s about smells, and the struggle to get that image.’ 

What happens next, in the studio, is a combination of life, memory and imagination, informed by an extraordinary relationship with nature summed up by Green in a quote from John Constable, another Suffolk-born landscape painter: “Still nature is the fountainhead, the source from which all must originally spring, and should an artist continue his practice without referring to nature, he must soon form a manner.”

*a volunteer working on local permaculture land - WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms)