Steven Francis Coates’s ambitious project, The Gathering, brings together the work of a hundred regional and international artists. The show is without hierarchy; each artist is invited to exhibit a single piece. Featuring multiple generations and overlapping circles of influence and friendship, the exhibition has the feel of an expansive family reunion. It is fitting that the hosts, Steven and Lucia Coates, ran a successful bakery prior to starting a gallery. There is a spirit of generosity and inclusiveness to events at the gallery, which has become a meeting place for figurative-leaning artists, collectors, and enthusiasts in the region. At show openings, visitors are offered delicious food from their bakery, ensuring that everyone leaves feeling well-fed both visually and gustatorily.
The 2025 series of exhibitions at SFFA revolve around the esteemed Staunton-based observational painter, Philip Geiger. The Gathering runs concurrently with Geiger’s retrospective exhibition at the Daura Museum at the University of Lynchburg. Many of the artists in The Gathering are connected to Geiger in one way or another, as friends, family, students, and admirers. Others are known to Steven Francis through the greater Lynchburg art community, his painter wife Lucia, or through his years as a traveling photographer. Visitors to Lynchburg can enjoy both exhibitions and a suite of associated events, making the opening a weekend-long celebration.
Philip Geiger is a painter of interior scenes of daily life, recalling both Dutch genre painting and later Intimist traditions in France. I suspect that this tradition is a touchstone for many others in The Gathering exhibition, as a fondness for everyday objects, places, and people runs through the diverse array of work. The repetition of familiar motifs can bring meaning and dignity to the mundane, but it can also engender innovation as it liberates the artist to focus on formalist concerns of color, paint handling, and compositional innovation. One must only think of the Impressionist painters of modern life and their artistic descendants – Cézanne and his mountain, Matisse’s windows, Picasso and Braque’s newspaper-scattered tabletops.
The term “Intimist” is closely associated with the post-Impressionist painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, who painted their domestic spheres almost exclusively. Their family members and close friends are the apparent subjects, but every other element within the scene - a bowl of fruit, a patterned wall, a landscape out the window, is imbued with equal vitality. The figures are deeply felt, and can carry a strong psychological charge, but the visual focus is often elsewhere, perhaps a lamp in the background, or a seemingly inconsequential negative shape. Frequently, the figures meld into the space around them, fused into the fabric of daily life.
Like Bonnard and Vuillard, Philip Geiger divides his attention equally amongst all elements in the picture plane. But whereas those Intimists preferred flat shapes of color, Geiger’s work expresses more of a sculptural response to space and form. When I look at Philip Geiger’s paintings, I get the sense that the light itself is a central character. In the later works especially, a patch of light on the wall or coming through a window is expressed with startling, thick strokes, giving presence to the immaterial. We enjoy the skillfully painted figures but do not get stuck on them; they serve as guideposts to help orient ourselves within the space and its carefully calibrated intervals. Instead of remaining on the outside as voyeurs, we are drawn into the picture because of the unity and interconnectedness of the whole space, where the voids are just as felt as the characters.
This democracy of attention applied to the humblest of subjects can be seen in other works in The Gathering. In “Chocolate Door”, John Lee paints a grim institutional building, teasing out a sumptuous variety of color reflected on the blank white walls, contained within the austere structure of repeated rectangles. In Peter Van Dyck’s “McDonald’s Parking Lot”, the viewer is so immediately pulled into its deep space full of painterly accretions and filigreed lines, that the drab iconography becomes an afterthought. Richard Crozier, a former colleague of Phil Geiger’s who has made a career out of painting his everyday surroundings in Charlottesville, presents a poetic meditation on a snowy day in “Winter View from Studio”, the interwoven pattern of fence, tree, and snow dissolving into a Monet-like abstract surface.
Though observation is at the core of the exhibition, there are works that veer in a more imaginative direction. David Campbell’s “Pretending to Watch TV” presents a humorous, dollhouse-like riff on the domestic interior, populated by primitive figures with matchstick limbs. In “Path”, Brian Rego pulls and distorts the space of an otherwise ordinary landscape, creating a world that is both playful and ominous, and approaches the mythic quality of a Stanley Spencer. Margaret McCann’s “Freudian Still Life” presents a jumbled collection of symbolic objects, strangely scaled and connected by a sea of agitated white drapery, painted with a heightened clarity reminiscent of Northern Renaissance painting.
For the casual observer, it is easy to conflate figurative painting with a kind of backwards-looking academicism. Now that art is seen primarily on screens, it only takes a fraction of a second to mentally file a painting into one category or another, and to succumb to a general visual fatigue. What this exhibition offers, to those that make the journey to see it, is an immersion in a great variety of tactile responses to the observed world. There is exquisite craftsmanship to be seen, nuanced vision and hard-won battles with the fickle nature of perception. The impact of the work is ever more surprising and immediate because of the intimacy of the venue itself, devoid of formality or pretentiousness. Anyone who takes the time to truly look is invited to join the conversation.
Kathleen Hall is a painter and educator based in Roanoke, Virginia.