"For Philip Geiger" by Randall Stoltzfus

This note accompanies “The School of Beauty & Goodness” exhibition located at SFFA Tradewynd Gallery, showing January 4 - February 22, 2025.

In 1989, I arrived at UVA certain of one thing: I would not become a painter. I knew I enjoyed drawing and making art. But I had other, more serious interests. And since house painting was the family business, I definitely wanted to do something that didn’t involve a brush. Paint thinner and surface preparation were in the past.

I followed my nose and declared a biology major when I had to choose. But somewhere in the first year or two I couldn’t resist and signed up for an intro drawing course. I don’t remember whether or not I had researched the class carefully before signing up. But I do remember that when I arrived on the first day the classroom was packed. Everybody wanted to study with Philip Geiger. I stuck it out while the class was whittled down to a manageable number and somehow I made the cut. From that first encounter, I felt lucky to be in his classroom.

The first assignments are lost to me, but I remember drawing with charcoal from still life setups and being amazed at the level of work that was expected of us and the energy with which the students responded. At the end of each class few drawings would be pinned to the wall for discussion. It was a big deal when your drawing was selected, and I worked hard to earn a place on that wall. Before I knew it I was hooked and I began to take at least one art class a semester.

I eventually approached Philip about taking on studio art as a minor. In his clear and concise way he suggested perhaps I should sign up as a major. This would give me some priority when enrolling in art classes. I remember being surprised at the suggestion, but agreed.

There are several other classes with Philip that I remember distinctly. Figure drawing was a big one. Drawing from the nude was pretty far outside what I could imagine myself doing coming from my modest Mennonite background. And as you know if you’ve attempted it, drawing from life is challenging. By this time I had seen Philip’s own work as a figure painter, and so had an ambitious idea of what was possible. The rest of the students felt it too. The atmosphere in the classroom was electric. I remember hearing Philip say “Good. Now…have the courage to vigorously erase.” Which we did, again and again. Reworking things, it turned out, was a key I was going to need.

Learning to work with artist oils felt slippery and chaotic, even if the brush in my hand felt familiar. But Philip taught in a way that was organized and systematic. In advanced painting he assigned precise palette preparations — neat grids of hue and shade that we mixed as homework before the next class. While mixing a greyscale felt natural enough, creating a grid of tertiary shades was mind bending. Yet these constraints gave me wings, somehow. I remember a still life setup lit by a large bank of electric lights, which I chose to place in the middle of my composition. And I remember I won praise for whatever I managed to paint while staring into this artificial sun. I’m not entirely certain of what was said at the time, but it made an impression. I am still obsessed with back-lighting, and it reoccurs in my artwork to this day. And then there were a few precious classes where we learned the vocabularies of color and facture. It was so enabling to have Philip’s systematic presentation of words for the way paint behaved and was manipulated. These were things I had felt strongly when working with a house-painters brush. I didn’t have the perspective to know it at the time, but being taught that vocabulary was validating in a deep way.

The moment that changed my mind came as a surprise, fallout from a conflict with a physics lab-lecture teaching assistant. When he pointedly refused my request to occasionally miss his class — which my biology major depended on — so I could attend an art class, something clicked. I realized I was fighting for what I truly loved. It was suddenly clear: I would much rather study art. Once again I went to find Philip, and he cleared his throat and said we’ve got work to do. In order to complete the studio art major in the time remaining I would need to double up on classes. Philip became my thesis advisor for some independent study to get me over the finish line. With his encouragement I received a small research grant that enabled me to pay for extra time working from the model, a practice I have returned to repeatedly throughout my career. At the same time he nurtured my desire to work from imagination, drawing and painting the landscape spaces I had grown up in — another practice I continue still today. I never stopped feeling challenged by him as a teacher. I also remember feeling a great deal of joy at working hard at making art and receiving his feedback.

In 1993 I was awarded a diploma with highest distinction for a BA in studio art. It said quite clearly on the piece of paper that I had specialized in — ironically enough — painting. An entire world had opened up for me in those four years, leading me to graduate school and then eventually to New York, where I live and work today. Philip Geiger’s guidance and encouragement transformed not just my art, but my life’s direction. Thank you, Philip. You made a difference.

"Ode to Philip Geiger" by Laura Wooten

This note accompanies “The School of Beauty & Goodness” exhibition at SFFA Tradewynd Gallery, showing January 4 - February 22, 2025.

In 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 in 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?

"Painting and the Beauty of the World: The Work of Philip Geiger" by Scott Noel

Philip Geiger began to paint interiors with figures while at Washington University in the mid-nineteen seventies. Over the next forty-eight years he became one of the most important American interpreters of a motif that first appears in ancient Roman frescoes and achieves its apotheosis in the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century. Geiger’s work strongly evokes painters like De Hooch, Terborch and Vermeer, but also vibrates with the achievements of Vuillard, Bonnard, Sickert, Hopper, and Fairfield Porter. All grows from the stimulus of earlier art and Geiger’s work exudes historical sophistication, yet the paintings are unique, his style inimitable.

The power and distinction of Geiger’s images was noted in his earliest exhibitions. After years of shows and an influential teaching career at the University of Virginia, his work has touched hundreds of younger painters, but, remarkably, has few true imitators. His manner could not be said to have generated a school, let alone any dogmatic precepts like those associated with charismatic teachers. Still, many contemporary realists find inspiration and even a kind of compass in Geiger’s achievement.

Steven Coates’ projected series of shows about Philip Geiger and his extended family among contemporary painters, young and old, offers an opportunity to admire beautiful pictures and to speculate on the stakes of his project. What, exactly, has he been up to and what do painters find so compelling? The art of painting is entangled in craft and the transmission of pictorial conventions and one’s peers have often been the best assessors of a fellow painter’s work. To that end, it might be well to survey some of Philip’s contemporaries as well as those he has challenged and inspired. Lincoln Perry, Mike Ananian, Jeffrey Carr, Elaine Wilson, Frank Galuszka, Bill Scott, Randall Exon, Susan Lichtman, Eve Mansdorf, Tim Kennedy, Doug Martenson, Mark Green, Peter Van Dyke, Aaron Thompson, John Lee, David Campbell, David Baird, and his wife and son, Elizabeth and Martin, could provide illuminating testimony and a start.

I include myself in this testimony. I’ve known Philip for fifty years and our conversations over the decades have been essential to my development. It is said artists create for a circle of ideal viewers and auditors. Geiger has fulfilled that role in my working life. I have the greatest respect for his painting, but also his thinking about painting. When we were students we developed a solidarity in our enthusiasm for earlier art. Philip loved Ingres and Vermeer and I loved Velazquez and Degas. The prestige of modernist abstraction began to wither in the nineteen seventies, but representational painting was still thought a banal activity. It was suggested that observation-based painting was a rote and uncreative pursuit. But working from life was what we pursued, starting from the pencil portraits we’d make of our classmates in our first year of school.

When we surveyed contemporary painting there were interesting fires on the horizon, Balthus, Lucian Freud, John Koch, Sidney Goodman, William Coldstream, Euan Uglow, Lennart Anderson, Gretna Campbell, George Nick, Frank Auerbach, Rackstraw Downes, Antonio Lopez, and Isabel Quintanilla, to name a few. What strikes me about this roundup is the sheer diversity of seeing embodied in a vivid painterliness. How could it be that representational paintings of shared visual circumstances could be so different and convincing at the same time?

Perhaps Philip recognized sooner than I how imaginative and abstract painting had to be to get anywhere near the beauty of the world it sought to express. Gradually, an itinerary came into view that went like this:

The visual world, everything available to the eye, has a beauty to which painting can respond.

The phenomenon we register in seeing can be understood only in relation to other bits of information such that the world is a fabric of interdependent “stuff.”

Paint is itself “stuff” which can produce equivalents for the felt fabric of sensory relations.

Powerful painting gives an account of these relations in concrete alignments. Color becomes light, closely related color becomes atmosphere, shape and geometry become space, and the surface of paint becomes a matrix from which painted reality emerges.

A description of painting this capacious allows Piero, Rubens, Renoir and Monet, Morandi and Dickinson to claim equal rights in a mysterious epistemological pursuit. Since our perceptions of the world can be measured within certain criteria, an artist is tempted to believe their accounts of visual experience escape the arbitrary promptings of desire to a safe harbor of accuracy and reason. This is almost laughably untrue and, again, Philip grasped this earlier than most representational painters.

Thinking of Philip’s pictures, I see rooms of specific color, oyster gray, salmon pink, mint green. Figures and furniture participate in the color to create an atmosphere that annexes every nameable thing to itself. Windows and doorways pierce and punctuate the color world of the room and in the openings we find alternate worlds, sometimes with a parallel series of notes in a different key. The figures found in Geiger’s interiors, at a table, talking, moving about, sometimes sleeping, though visually prominent, are made of reflected light from the windows and lamps which announce the color of the rooms they inhabit. Specific as portraits, they are often silhouettes emptied of detail and met by a reciprocal silhouette of a wall or a window. For a moment we are invited to consider whether figure or room is the painter’s generative source. Charged with psychological portent, the continuum of rooms and openings is perhaps, a metaphor for the folded corridors of mind and memory. In this sense, the picture is a mind.

For any of this pictorial magic to happen, with its transit from sensation to analogy to metaphor, something must transform a realists’ scruples about the facts into poetry. In Philip’s case, painting beautifully releases beautiful seeing. His painted surfaces are a fabric of dabs and hatches, shapes carved and cut, that reveal themselves on a slightly different schedule from the depicted figures, floors, windows and walls. Things lack pride of place in the unfolding image. The shape interval between two figures at a table is likely a pictorial verb narrating their relationship. The mosaic-like fitting of the shapes within the close color atmosphere creates a kind of compression where every moment seems significant , a continuously firing circuit of mark and image that drives the narrative. These painting qualities recall the French phrase, “la Bonne peinture.” Good painting entailed the acknowledgment of paint’s physical substance, robust concision of drawing, and precision of color. One of Philip’s early passions, Ingres, said the beauty in painting consisted of a piece of color coming upon another it most closely resembled. Philip is a natural heir of this aesthetic disposition.

Among themselves, painters have a code of professional acknowledgments, a way of assessing achievement that is so straightforward and laconic a beautiful painting can be met with a shake of the head and an exhaled expletive. This is high praise and often greets Philip’s best pictures. We’re impressed with elegant solutions to complex problems but also mad missions to say something almost unsayable. Philip has taken on many difficult painting problems like the poetic possibilities of a parking lot and the ragged edges of suburban life. Portraiture, the nude and still life have each been explored within the overarching theme of interior space, but none has ever been sentimentalized. Instead, there has been an understated commitment to the idea of invention. With artists, invention is a crucial value because it captures an intuition the world given to us demands our participation in its creation. We understand the world through our intepretations. An initial reaction to Philip’s work is usually surprise and delight, but we are also tempted to take the order, wit and clarity of the paintings for granted, as if, that’s just the way the world is. Philip’s inventiveness is of a self-effacing kind, inviting you to grasp an identity between the beauty of the paintings and the beauty of the world. It’s a gift to let us inhabit this kind of faith. Yet Philip created this space where seeing, inventing and painting merge to make a world. Steven Coates is inclined to call this ambition “the school of beauty and goodness.” Long ago I described this feeling in my own work as “the space of desire.” The important point is that Philip tends to conceal the invented nature of his world. Rooms and landscapes of the most unexpected color are directly observed while figures so precise in gesture and profile they are the soul of truth were, in fact, quite often made up. All the paintings suggest lyrical reportage while being fiction.

There is a question accompanying the work as to its poetic outcome because when the categories of observation and invention are so deeply folded together, I for one, am left with a sense of longing, a feeling the paintings have emerged to fill an absence, to repair a wound. I wonder if some of the power of Philip Geiger’s work to inspire other painters is his engagement with just this complex longing.