In the collaboration with The Philip Geiger Project and the exhibition, The School of Beauty and Goodness, January 2025, Steven Francis Fine Art, Lynchburg, VA.
In the fall of 1989, I was beginning my college courses at the University of Virginia and about to take my first figure drawing class. In the charming upstairs studio of Brooks Hall, with its floor to ceiling half-moon windows spilling sunlight across the creaky wooden floors, I watched Professor Geiger get to work. He arranged the model on the stand and paced the room, giving calm and clear instruction to the class, an understated enthusiasm brightening his voice. We made piles of quick, timed gesture drawings, learning to see the long lines, the curves of the spine, the tilt of the hips, the action of gravity on flesh and bones. We made slower studies as well, learning to check and recheck the elegant proportions, the flexion of joints, the parts adding up to the whole. The dust of vine charcoal collected in my fingerprints and settled in my clothes, the soft erasures of the chamois an extension of my hand, searching for the shapes of light. The course was rigorous and highly challenging, but also generous, motivating and expansive. Walking back to my dorm room after class, I saw each person that I passed as a magnificent machine, a wonder of interconnected volumes, angles, lines, and light.
Philip Geiger’s beginning painting class was even more revelatory for me. Our subject matter was the figure in an interior space. I had never used a large glass palette or squeezed out so much paint. We learned to mix exacting steps of a value scale, how to modulate temperature and saturation, how to work the fascinating interplay of complements. We invested time in mixing a large matrix from limited tubes, an interrelated world of carefully calibrated colors, before placing even one brushstroke on the canvas. I learned the importance of relationships, looking beyond the local hues, finding meaning within the context of neighboring colors. In learning to really look, I found unimaginable surprises, like the warm reflected light that hides on the cool depths of shadows. Painting with this pre-mixed palette, I saw a convincing reality take shape on my canvas. Not one that appeared as reality, but rather a parallel truth, bound by a unified light. Walking home after class, I saw the whole world in paint, mixing the colors in my mind, the harmonies humming, the quiet joy of seeing as a painter, the beauty and the goodness of being alive.
As I went on to develop my own body of work, I continued to absorb all that I had learned. I studied the artists Philip had pointed me toward. Pierre Bonnard, Jean-Édouard Vuillard, and Fairfield Porter resonated the most for me, as they transmuted the visual magic and mystery of their own familiar surroundings. I painted the neighborhood vista from the fire escape of my apartment building. I painted my friends in the studio. I painted landscapes, parking lots and coffee cups. I was unsure of the thread of meaning in these things, and yet the relationships of color, shape and light held poetry that Philip helped me to see, acknowledge and deeply value. Sometimes it was just a purple shadow that fell across the road, or the small triangle of a tree alone on a hill, but they called out to be painted, and so I accepted their calling and felt no need to seek out something grander or more picturesque. These days, I can go no further than my backyard or my studio window to find unfathomable worlds of intricate beauty, a thousand paintings waiting to be painted. Philip once said in an interview that painting is an act of optimism, because every time we pick up a brush, we believe that our best painting could be our next painting. That surely keeps us going. Or is it simply knowing the inexhaustible beauty of the world is always there waiting for us?