1/7/2024 0 Comments Color machine gearyShortly after that visit, I put one large painting by Geary in a show with a single sculpture by May Wilson and called it “some other sense of time and space,” after a quote by Marcia Tucker that came from the book. On my first studio visit with Geary about five years ago or so, she lent me her copy of the book High Times, Hard Times about the experimental phase of abstract painting in the late 1960s and early 70s in New York. A few are humble and quiet, consisting of a simple shape and a single color, while others are multifaceted and composed of strong color contrasts. They might have been temporarily kicked out before finding their way home again. They feel like rebellious parts of the larger paintings broken free. But they are also autonomous, and sometimes playfully awkward. In a practical sense, they can be put into infinite arrangements and allow Geary to think through color and shape relationships that often find their way back into her larger works. And she has been producing shaped paintings-roughly cut, vibrantly painted wood panels. In other explorations, Geary has worked with cut paper, taping a mixture of shapes to the wall in a large grid, as if to deconstruct her paintings into all of their parts. The sewing brings another line quality that is not my hand.” As Geary explained, “I tried gluing them at first and they didn’t have any energy. They contained pieces of sheer and opaque paper, cut-up drawings, pieces of fabric that she had painted or block-printed, all sewn together on a sewing machine. On a recent studio visit, several lovely examples of these were framed and stacked up on a table, destined for the Berkeley Art Museum collection. For example, she has been making collage on a more intimate scale, a move that was inspired in part by her exposure to various textile traditions. Geary’s interest in relationships between shape and color on the two-dimensional surface has led her toward a variety of experimentations. It involves layering, scraping and reapplying color and shapes until a dynamic composition is achieved. They are characterized by vibrant color, intersecting shapes and Geary’s energetic engagement with the surface. Foremost are stacks of her large, vertically oriented oil paintings on canvas. Her two-level studio space is teeming with work. Her work has been defined by a constant process of reinvention, reaching a kind of crescendo of activity in recent years. The evolution of Linda Geary’s practice has been something like this. Within this variability, though, there is a natural flow that emerges in a particular direction. A river is constantly reinventing itself in relation to its environment and the materials it comes into contact with. When rivers flow, they pick up bits and pieces of debris, churn them over, drop things and accumulate new material as they go.
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