Art Sync: The Deep End

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. And I’m still trying to understand it. I focused on still lifes because I liked to experiment and control the elements of artmaking: the lighting, the composition, the palette. I started painting outside as a break from studio setups and to make myself work faster and more intensely. Painting landscapes helped my still lifes, forcing me to simplify and organize. I tell myself, “When I get tired of still lifes, I’ll go back outside.” But that never happens. The more I dig in, the more obsessed I become with still lifes. 

LG: I consider the negative spaces and shadows as much as the things themselves, and that’s why I like Modernist painters. Every part of the image is important: the chair rail on the back wall is as important as the bottle. The pressure is equal everywhere, it’s moving forward, and pushing up against the canvas or picture plane as opposed to pushing back into space like traditional painting.

Generally, I like tension in a painting. For example, I’ll make more realistic objects on a flatter, upturned table to highlight “This Is Painting.” For the Modernists, painting itself is the subject. But frontality and shallow space also characterize Classical and pre-Renaissance painting. I like straddling the two, working between old and new, between the real and imaginary.

EJ: Still Life After Picasso And de Heem could be considered Neo-Cubist, since it presents familiar Cubist subjects: musical instruments, a score, bottles, fruit, interior shadows and surfaces...

LG: I thought of the whole image as much as possible. This helped me figure out the big divisions and tones. I stopped considering what the “things” were and just saw the lighter side and the darker side, the triangle here and the triangle there. I wanted to play straight geometry against curved shapes. Sometimes I made a list of what I planned to change the next day, so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Keeping the whole painting in mind while working on the parts was the hardest part.

EJ: Would you, for instance, start with the Picasso composition and apply the de Heem colors and shapes? Or is that evolving in the wrong direction for you?

LG: I wouldn’t start with Modernism and work backwards from it. I see it as a one-way evolution. Just as I couldn’t write a symphony based on a rap song, I couldn’t go back to the correct drawing from a distorted drawing. I wouldn’t have enough information to do that. I would instead set up a still life and look at it...

LG: Now, after digesting it through a Modernist lens, I’d like to make a direct copy of the de Heem, but it could take me an incredibly long time, it's so large and complicated. After my show, I want to return to more traditional, observational painting and drawing and see what happens. I suspect Modernism’s residue will still be there.

Still life differs from landscape in terms of light and atmosphere. Those things are constantly changing outside, whereas in my studio the light and atmosphere mostly stay the same. This can feel repetitive and may be why I alternate between indoors and out, and between direct and invented painting in the studio.

EJ: As you reorder simplified shapes in your composite of the two painters, what do you struggle with?

LG: What to leave out and what to group together colorwise. I started with a small color study based on the de Heem, but I used different hues. Though, when I enlarged the study onto the big canvas, the effect just wasn’t the same. Looking at the Picasso helped me use a limited palette of primary colors, black and white. Using limited colors changed the intention from realism to having a variety of shapes work together. This meant I had to repaint some things many times to work with surrounding color shapes. Ultimately, I had to let go of the traditional tonal structure and palette of the de Heem. That is when things started to happen.

EJ: Still Life With Fruit And Skull makes a nice contrast between a frontal and overhead Cubist views. You use a frame of broken shapes that surround the pair to echo the interlocking shapes that join them. Did this composition arise in response to a Cubist painting? Or was it a spontaneous invention from what you know and remember about Cubism?

LG: I definitely want to do this. I think everyone is interpreting when they paint. If I set up a still life and a dozen people painted it, all the paintings would look different because there are a dozen different brains interpreting what they see. An art studio isn’t a school science lab where a dozen people can follow exact procedures and come out with the same results. It’s more like a playground, where you let your intuition and imagination roam.

If Rembrandt and Matisse were painting the same model, the results would be completely different. Rembrandt wasn’t painting in a room with black walls and Matisse’s wife didn’t have a green stripe running down her face. The artists each had unique visions that influenced what they saw. As Thoreau said, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

–– Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)

Edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)

March 2023