by MegAnne Liebsch

Starting this week, the artwork of Philadelphia realist painter Matthew Green, 45, will be featured at Gravers Lane Gallery. The month-long gallery showing, which is free to the public, will begin with an opening reception on Thursday, Aug. 18, 5 - 8 p.m., and it will run until Sept. 25.

“Matthew brings an exciting contemporary landscape perspective to Chestnut Hill,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of Gravers Lane. “We often are confronted with being a very conservative neighborhood regarding the arts.”

“I am a realist painter with a lean to the abstract,” said Green, “and I try to capture more than the physical structure of a building or landscape. I find the essence of a subject and show beauty in the nuances.”

Green’s art often focuses on landscapes and objects that show beauty in unconventional ways. His past paintings have depicted the conflict between man and nature by showing landscapes that contrast industrial elements with nature, such as abandoned buildings overrun with plant life.

“It began with a fascination for found objects,” he said about his love of art. “It's the stuff that floats in on the tide, blows in on the wind or rises up from the soil; random objects, even buildings once centers of industry or tourist destinations, that are turned from useful to useless.”

Green can see the strength and allure in things and in their history, and he tries to show both the harsh realities and magnificent beauties in everyday life.

Born in Teaneck, NJ, in 1970, Green was primarily raised in New Jersey. He has lived in and around Philadelphia since the 1990s. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in May, 1994, from Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ. Since 1996 his work has been exhibited in at least 20 galleries and other venues in Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York City and Chicago.

Matt is at once an outdoorsman and city lover, free-spirited designer and meticulous producer. By day he has worked as an art director since 1999, and by night he paints and writes in his home studio, where a record collection and nearness of family keep him inspired.

Green’s new pieces for the Gravers showing shift away from his industrial vs. nature style. The paintings are a combination of landscapes from trips to Delaware and New Mexico, which he said have pushed him out of his artistic comfort zone.

The work of local realist painter Matthew Green will be featured at Gravers Lane Gallery from Aug. 18 through Sept. 25.

Last year, Green participated in a painting-worship trip called Conversations with Land, which incorporated meditative and Native American spirituality with the landscape of New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch, which was also home to legendary painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), the “Mother of American Modernism” who is best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers and New Mexico landscapes.

“I’ve been working as a realist painter for about the last 10-15 years, and the style of work I was doing in the workshop was very visceral and expressive, and it pushed me a little outside of my comfort zone,” Green said. “What resulted was more colorful and loose with a much freer application of paint then I had done in the past.”

Green usually photographs his landscapes with strict attention to detail on 35-millimeter film, but in New Mexico he relied solely on his iPhone. “I felt like intentionally not having so much detailed information would force me to be more interpretive and less literal, allowing more freedom and expression.”

As of now, only two of the Ghost Ranch paintings are complete, “The Labyrinth” and “Square Rock.” He plans on continuing the series with paintings inspired by another ranch town, called Las Colinas, in Texas.

Gravers Lane Gallery is located at 8405 Germantown Ave. More information at www.graverslanegallery.com or 215-247-1603.