Ethel Greene

One of San Diego’s most noted painters, Ethel Greene was an extraordinary artist known for her surrealist pictures as well as images abstracted from nature. She exhibited the latter frequently during the early 1960s around Southern California.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Ethel Greene grew up in Boston and attended Boston University School of Art, The Boston Museum School and graduated from the Massachusetts School of Art. She moved to San Diego in 1943 without having visited the city prior or knowing anyone. She left her job at a Boston greeting card company to work here for an aircraft company. Her education in “the finer virtues of realism and design and how lovely watercolors could be” turned to a fondness for the work of Rene Magritte…. She loved surrealism for its extravagance--its intention to surprise.”

She sold her first painting to a man in Linda Vista in the 1950s,

Ms. Greene lived in Spring Valley in a house bought at an auction in 1955 for $1,725 by architect Lloyd Ruocco about the same time she left the working world to paint, exhibit and sell full-time.

Her work in the early 1960s reflected a “recent turn from the meticulous and descriptive detail to large and broad planes” according to Dr. Armin Kietzmann, The San Diego Union’s art writer. Kietzmann added, that Greene had “developed toward substantial simplicity… [creating] statements in a few broad planes… to open spaces and intuitive rhythms.”

Selected Exhibitions:
San Diego Art Guild Annuals (1949-1963)
Artists of L.A. & Vicinity, Los Angeles County Museum (1950, 1952, 1955)
Art Center in La Jolla, one-person show (1956)
California Watercolor Society Annuals (1958, 1960, 1963)
San Diego Fine Arts Gallery, two-person show with Fred Holle (1961)
San Diego County Fair (1963)
Cal Western University Invitational (1963)
Southwestern College (1962)
Long Beach Museum of Art, Arts of Southern California XIII (1963)
Jefferson Gallery, one-person shows (1963, 1965)