After losing a lifetime of artwork in the Palisades Fire, Green returns with luminous new visions that uncover the inner lives of historical figures, animals, and loved ones.
By John Lavitt
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 07-12-2026
Next Saturday, Los Angeles audiences will have the rare opportunity to see Sacramentals, the first public exhibition in three decades by painter and Emmy-nominated television writer Raf Green.
Presented for two days only at Exhibit A Gallery, the show opens with a reception on Saturday, July 18, from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. It continues on Sunday, July 19, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The gallery is located at 1056 S. Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.
The word “rare” is appropriate. Green has spent much of the past 25 years writing for television, including work on Star Trek and an Emmy-nominated stint on National Geographic’s Genius: Picasso.
Before television, however, he was a visual artist whose dense crayon-on-cardboard drawings appeared at the New York Outsider Art Fair, the Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago, Storyopolis in Los Angeles, and in museums throughout Europe.
Now he has returned to the canvas with a body of work that feels less like a career transition and more like a spiritual homecoming.
I should acknowledge my personal connection. Raf Green is my best friend in the world. I have witnessed his brilliance, generosity, humor, sorrow, and determination over many years. Yet friendship alone cannot account for the power of these paintings.
The work stands on its own. It is emotionally vulnerable, intellectually ambitious, technically daring, and filled with an unmistakable longing to find the sacred within ordinary life.
That longing intensified after the 2025 Palisades Fire destroyed Green’s home and his entire archive of artwork. After losing paintings, journals, family keepsakes, and decades of creative history, he moved from the coast to the remote mountains above Palm Desert. Surrounded by desert animals, silence, and isolation, he created an entirely new collection.
Green describes the fire as an ongoing lesson in impermanence. Yet painting resists impermanence in a striking way. A centuries-old portrait can still confront us with a living presence. As Green observes, paintings appear to freeze time, even as they remain vulnerable to disappearance.
That tension—between permanence and loss, flesh and spirit, and mortality and transcendence—runs throughout Sacramentals.
The exhibition pairs intimate portraits with large devotional works inspired by medieval altarpieces and Old Master painting. Green adopts the symmetry, gold leaf, visual intensity, and unapologetic spiritual ambition of traditional religious art. However, he replaces established religious hierarchies with a Buddhist vision in which holiness belongs equally to humans, animals, artists, strangers, and the natural world.
The extraordinary “Saint Jane” may be the clearest expression of this vision. Measuring 19 by 30 inches and executed in oil and gold leaf on panel, it depicts Jane Goodall cradling a chimpanzee within the visual framework of the Madonna and Child.
The painting is a true work of genius. Green is not mocking religious imagery or reducing it to a clever cultural reference. He is expanding its possibilities. Jane Goodall becomes a modern saint, and the chimpanzee receives the same tenderness, dignity, and spiritual significance traditionally reserved for the Christ child.
By combining real gold leaf and sacred iconography with the work of a scientist who deepened humanity’s understanding of primates, Green challenges the false divide between the sacred and the supposedly profane. Evolution does not diminish creation. Our descent from ape-like ancestors can be understood as equally miraculous, mysterious, and holy.
Green explains that the substitution is neither a joke nor a parody but “a sincere canonization of a modern saint and a glorious and equally exalted animal.” His goal is to recognize the divinity in everyone and everything.
The spiritual and philosophical center of the exhibition is the Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, depicted in an intimate eight-by-eight-inch oil painting on metal.
Hopkins believed that art could function as a sacramental: a creation that prepares the viewer for an embodied encounter with God. Green has adopted that idea as the foundation of the entire show.
Like Hopkins’ poetry, these paintings are intended as conduits to the holy—meditative reflections on light that encourage spiritual elevation and reveal sacred beauty throughout the living world.
In the small portrait, Green captures Hopkins’ vulnerability and melancholy. The poet chose the disciplined, often restrictive life of a Jesuit priest. He struggled with anguish, periods of creative silence, and what scholars now believe may have been chronic depression. His poetic originality went largely unrecognized in his lifetime.
Yet Hopkins’ final words were reportedly, “I am so happy, I am so happy.”
Green’s portrait captures that contradiction. The face appears sensitive, wary, and burdened, yet also illuminated by an interior life that cannot be extinguished. Hopkins’ suffering did not cancel out his sacred brilliance. It may have intensified his determination to discover what he called the “inscape”—the unique divine identity within every created thing.
That same blend of beauty and burden appears in Green’s 11-by-14-inch oil portrait of Duke Ellington.
Ellington is portrayed not merely as a glamorous icon but as a working artist shouldering enormous responsibility. For years, the legendary bandleader toured the United States, including the segregated Jim Crow South, while confronting racism, prejudice, financial pressure, and the practical burden of keeping a large orchestra employed.
Green conveys both elegance and exhaustion. Ellington’s blue eyes remain alert, yet the face bears the cost of sustaining beauty in a society determined to impose ugliness on him. The painting recognizes the tremendous labor beneath Ellington’s refinement: the effort required to remain solvent, protect his musicians, preserve his artistic standards, and sustain positivity.
It is the portrait of a beautiful soul carrying a weight the audience was never meant to witness. Indeed, it reveals the price artists often pay to express their souls to the world. Caught in the turbulence of history, Ellington carried burdens far greater than many of us ever understood, and Green captures their weight with painful precision.
The exhibition’s most personal work may be “Daisy and Jack,” a monumental 36-by-72-inch oil painting depicting Green’s daughter, Daisy, alongside Jack, a desert jackrabbit who frequents the area around his studio.
Unable to continue using expensive gold leaf on such a scale, Green relied on gold paint. The substitution sacrifices none of the painting’s spiritual impact. The gold transforms an intimate family image into an altarpiece.
Gold leaf art dates back more than 4,000 years, from ancient Egyptian temples and sarcophagi through Byzantine icons and Renaissance devotional painting. Historically, gold signaled heaven, eternity, authority, and divine presence.
Green turns that tradition on its head by asking a simple but profound question: What is truly divine in our lives?
Perhaps it is not confined to distant saints, institutional religion, or inherited mythology. Perhaps it is found in a daughter standing in her father’s studio. Perhaps it resides in a beloved animal, a shared home, a remembered afternoon, or in the fragile bond between living beings.
With Sacramentals, Raf Green does not abandon religious painting; he liberates it.
He bestows the halo on the scientist, the poet, the musician, the child, and the chimpanzee. He uses painting to honor what can be lost and to preserve what deserves reverence. Most importantly, he invites viewers to stand before these works in person, away from the flattening distance of a digital screen, and to encounter them as living objects.
As Green puts it, oil paintings are “living creatures.” A photograph cannot reproduce their texture, scale, luminosity, or physical presence.
Next weekend, these living creatures will gather on Fairfax Avenue for just two days. Come see them face to face. Experience the light, texture, vulnerability, and human presence of Raf Green’s remarkable work, which no digital reproduction can contain.
Raf Green: Sacramentals — New Paintings, Altarpieces and Portraits
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 18, 2026, 5:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.
Additional Hours: Sunday, July 19, 2026, 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Exhibit A Gallery
1056 S. Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, CA
Artist website: rafgreenart.com
