This note accompanies ”The Golden Age” exhibition located at the Baker Gallery of the Woodberry Forest School, showing January 10 - February 27, 2025.
In 1985, Philip Geiger generously suggested that I take over his classes when he took a sabbatical, and I will be forever grateful. Grateful because I got to spend time with both Philip and Richard Crozier, who also taught at the University of Virginia. We came to be jokingly called the School of Charlottesville, partly because we all showed at Tatistcheff Gallery on New York’s 57th Street, but also because we shared a passionate devotion to painting from life, a somewhat marginalized sector of the art world. Sitting in for Philip also allowed me to meet my future wife, Ann Beattie, and to make any number of friends in the town I soon moved to. Some think of artists as competitive, touchy, somewhat selfish and, often, heavy drinkers. Our little bank of brothers was none of the above. We were thrilled to be kindred spirits living within walking distance of each other, talking about each other’s work, but more often about the great art we all admired. Philip had found William Bailey as a sort of mentor, while mine had been Gabriel Laderman, and in some odd way, each man matched our own temperaments well. Bailey seemed skeptical that narrative was possible using the means we had at hand, and considered his still lives and nudes to be essentially abstract compositions, and Philip’s work shared some of that skepticism about story telling in painting. One can sense unspoken, highly convincing interactions between figures around a table in his work, moving moods in individual figures at rest. Like Edward Hopper, we are asked to supply our own narrative as images emerge from a profound sense of time suspended. Such reveries seem close to how Philip engages with life; thoughtful, quiet, stoical.
Every Wednesday evening Philip and I would cross paths in Brook’s Hall, where a model would pose for three hours. (For some mysterious reason at 8:30 PM, without fail, fire engines, horns blasting, would scream by, and we would know the session was half over.) One could watch Philip’s rapid painting procedure; blocking in large tonal shapes, zeroing in on smaller and finer specificities as the time passed. Some drawing groups are gossipy talk fests, but Philip seldom spoke, a study in quiet scrutiny. Having accumulated perhaps a hundred of these usually twelve by nine inch Masonite panels, we asked the then curator at UVA’s art museum if we could organize a show of three hour paintings by soliciting work from painters we admired. Though we specified very clearly the limit on dimensions and time spent on submitted work, we were dismayed when huge works arrived at the museum gallery, clearly most of them the product not of three hours but of days or weeks. Our brushy efforts of course looked summary in comparison, but the show had to go on. Philip and I never tried to curate again. In fact, I believe the University Art Department never really appreciated Philip’s brilliant painting and unsurpassed gift for teaching. He retired and left for nearby Staunton, where soon thereafter my wife and I relocated as well. This allowed me to continue to visit on Philip’s porch, as I had in Charlottesville usually every Sunday.
Philip’s wide ranging interests include not just in art, but our society’s profound lack of interest in, or even hostility to, what he finds most essential in civilization. Conversation resembles his paintings; clear, considered, highly informed. In a word, civilized. He is a dear friend and a magnificent artist.