“There has been much to absorb - new rooms, views out of windows, new light situations… I’m grateful for my job - looking at my set ups and building a parallel world on canvas is still the nagging, surprising, thrilling puzzle that it ever was.”
– Elizabeth Geiger
Valentine's Day, 26" x 22", Oil On Linen, 2008
Elizabeth Geiger majored in painting at the University of Virginia and continued her studies at the New York Studio School and the Vermont Studio Center. She is married to figurative painter Philip Geiger and they have two children studying art in college.
Geiger has won a fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and shown regularly throughout the East Coast. Her work is in the collection of the Sheltering Arms Hospital Richmond as well as the Clay Center Museum of Fine Art in Charleston, WV.
Known for her dramatic still life paintings, she has recently also focused her painting practice on landscape. Along with her regular teaching at the Beverley Street Studio School in Stuanton, VA, she has been a visiting artist at the College of William & Mary and the Kentucky College of Art & Design, spoken at Washington & Lee University and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, taught landscape painting at the Mount Gretna School of Art and leads workshops throughout the Eastern United States.
Roses And Brick, 20" x 12, Oil On Canvas
Geiger’s approach to painting is a balance of immediate gestures and calculated decisions. Her brushwork contains an energy that is closely connected to the carefully chosen objects that appear in her still life compositions. Geiger begins by finding something in a familiar object or setting that surprises her and, while painting, she often stands in a position looking down on her motif in order to create an intimate viewpoint.
While looking at objects arranged in her new studio, Geiger paints pictures. She translates the three-dimensional world she has composed onto a canvas making thousands of decisions based on her lifetime of painting, study of art, and human perception. Geiger’s finished paintings present a new reality closely related to her initial composition of fruits, bowls, bottles, and domestic objects. But through the indirect and mysterious translation that occurs between what she has seen and what she chooses to paint, the viewer is given something new; something to spark his/her imagination, and to reveal, through ordinary objects, another way to see.
Like actors on a stage, the objects in Geiger’s paintings assume roles. Instead of dialogue, they occupy spaces in her painted illusions. The nearness, distance, and focus that she chooses for these objects communicates their content. Objects rhyme and resonate with one another. Tension is created, relationships revealed. In their humility, Geiger’s paintings are unassumingly complex. Direct and sincere, Geiger’s paintings reveal the gains from a life of looking, painting, and learning from the humble objects occupying our daily lives.
“My paintings begin with a feeling of excitement—a rightness with the light. A feeling of space, a group of forms, a chord of colors can all start the process. A good set up feels like a memory—one I would like to have. My objects are so familiar at this point that I am free to alter the arrangement at any time while I am working.
My concern has begun to shift from the meaning of the objects to the light on them as the subject. I continue to reinterpret still life painting. Inspiration can come from a landscape, a portrait, a poem, or an abstract pattern. My original motivations or musings about the set up may not remain clear, but I hope the drama and mystery evoked by the objects and the paint itself stay with the viewer.”
- Elizabeth Geiger
Compote And Mandolin, 16" x 16", Oil On Linen
Elizabeth Gieger in Studio 2020 (Courtesy Painting Perceptions)
Larry Groff Interview with Elizabeth Geiger
2020
Larry Groff: What lead you to become a painter?
Elizabeth Geiger: When I was about 10 or 12 my father told me that the portrait of a man wearing a turban in our living room was painted by my grandmother. Surprised, I asked if there were other paintings and my father said, “No – she stopped painting. She said it was too hard.” I was curious …was it really THAT hard? Well, Grandma, it is. But it’s more fascinating than anything I could imagine.
LG: I understand you first majored in math before you changed to become an art student. I’m curious if geometry or other mathematical aesthetics like dynamic symmetry has ever played a role, either conscious or unconscious level in your compositions?
Women have been the cornerstone of operations and exhibitions at Gross McCleaf since Estelle Shane Gross opened her gallery in 1970 on the second floor of 1713 Walnut Street. Over 50 years later, Gross McCleaf is commemorating its rich history during (re)Focus 2024, a citywide festival celebrating women-identified and BIPOC artists.
Fortitude at 50: A Resilient Five Decades at Gross McCleaf Gallery features Martha Armstrong, Jan Baltzell, Joan Becker, Elizabeth Geiger, Eileen Goodman, Penelope Harris, Heidi Leitzke, Bertha Leonard, Ying Li, Ann Lofquist, Chelsey Luster, Bethann Parker, Nicole Parker, Jane Piper, Kimi Pryor, Mary Putman, Celia Reisman, Val Rossman, Mickayel Thurin, Leigh Werrell, and Lauren Whearty with self-portraits, dreamy narratives and formally complex still-life and landscape paintings. The works suggest a deep reflection of the self and a strong point of view conveyed through their distinct subjects and styles. The exhibition represents women artists in all stages of their careers who have helped shape the Gross McCleaf legacy and brand focus toward what Sharon Ewing, former owner and director, refers to as “painterly realism” – representation in painted form.
Elizabeth Johnson: Your previous still lifes and landscapes were realistic. Your recent paintings use Cubist formats and tropes. What made the change? Are you still doing landscapes? Are you focusing only on interiors for this show?
Liz Geiger: When I started painting, I was wide-eyed and open to anything and everything. Subject matter wasn’t as important as learning how to paint, how to make light and space. I worked only from observation and looked mostly at observational painting, which seemed natural being married to a realist painter. Later, I tackled composition, studying old composition books by the armload from The University of Virginia library. Understanding composition took years....
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Stuart Netsky’s rich digital paintings and colorful sculptural assemblages in Walking Backward into the Future. Here, Netsky continues his innovative exploration of materials and themes well known from his seminal 1992 ICA exhibition, Time Flies. This earlier work, created during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, courageously explored the intersections of the HIV/AIDS epidemic with contemporary domestic life, popular culture, and Western art history. During Netsky’s retrospective in 2006, Rosenwald Wolf Gallery Curator Sid Sachs described Netsky as having a practice that, “operates at the nexus of social representation and sculpture, sexual cliché, and self-presentation. Echoing a variety of historical styles such as Pop Art, Pattern and Decoration, and color field, Netsky retains a crisp classical sense of craft and sense of humor that is deadly serious.” His latest work is no exception as Netsky continues with a clear-eyed honesty and queer sensibility.
