This note accompanies “The Golden Age” exhibition located at the Baker Gallery of the Woodberry Forest School, showing January 10 - February 27, 2025.
It is a remarkable feature that the teaching about painting in the last 4 decades in Virginia that we can see a pattern that stands out as special as it embodies the uniqueness among the painters as teachers, each in our work, yet a common belief in working from life as a significant source for expression.
I have known this group of painters as colleagues at colleges and universities across Virginia, and I regard them as exceptional teachers as well as talented painters. One of my good friends is Philip Geiger, whose work I own and have found to be a source of inspiration. The interior setting for his painting is of several figures in a living room of a home; where one figure is sleeping on the sofa, one is leaning on the back of the sofa and another is sitting in a shadowy space far away. The figures have an implied narrative, yet it remains a mystery what they have been doing just before they are caught in this moment in time. The light in the room has a silvery tone and there is a bright peach colored outdoor space that is visible through the window. Philip has invented this situation that is from working over an accumulation of days. Painting for him is an act to discovery and revision. He is not satisfied with just having us identify the stuff he paints; he wants it to be an evocative image that makes us wonder and re-examine it with each new viewing.
I have been so fortunate to have so many special colleagues who are also engaged in working from life, each in our own ways. Since the 1960s when a revival of serious painting from life developed, and it was not simply a nostalgic act to reject modernist ideas, like the values of the picture plane, but to reconcile them, making an image that has both a deep space and acceptance of the 2D nature of the painting.
As teachers across the state, we were committed to these shared values about working from life. This was something I felt was important and unique. Without knowing it we were creating a golden age of painting, which I believe was less visible until Steven Francis Fine Art Gallery brought it out in the open, to share theses artists and their work to a new public.