Linda Geary | When Rivers Flow

From a limited edition series of books about Geary’s work with writings by Norma Cole, Scott Hewicker, Lawrence Rinder, and Jordan Stein.

When rivers flow, they pick up bits and pieces of debris, churn them over, drop things and accumulate new material as they go. A river is constantly reinventing itself in relation to its environment and the materials it comes into contact with. Within this variability, though, there is a natural flow that emerges in a particular direction.

The evolution of Linda Geary’s practice has been something like this. Her work has been defined by a constant process of reinvention, reaching a kind of crescendo of activity in recent years. Her two-level studio space is teeming with work. Foremost are stacks of her large, vertically oriented oil paintings on canvas. They are characterized by vibrant color, intersecting shapes and Geary’s energetic engagement with the surface. Her process is very physical. It involves layering, scraping and reapplying color and shapes until a dynamic composition is achieved. 

Geary’s interest in relationships between shape and color on the two-dimensional surface has led her toward a variety of experimentations. 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. 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. 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. As Geary explained, “I tried gluing them at first and they didn’t have any energy. The sewing brings another line quality that is not my hand.”

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. And she has been producing shaped paintings—roughly cut, vibrantly painted wood panels.

I like these shaped paintings. 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. But they are also autonomous, and sometimes playfully awkward. They feel like rebellious parts of the larger paintings broken free. Some are like castaways. They might have been temporarily kicked out before finding their way home again. 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 have pizazz.

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. Shortly 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. Tucker had described Jane Kauffman’s work in a way that I felt resonated with Geary’s— as capturing “some other sense of time and space, belonging to the world, but stronger than my immediate surroundings.” (1)

the river
keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its
long journey, its pale, infallible voice
singing. (2)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the flow of life since my mother died earlier this year—and about things “stronger than my immediate surroundings.” My mom loved the metaphor of the river. When I asked my son whether he thought she was still present or if her spirit was gone, he replied emphatically that she must still be “here.” How could such a lively spirit just go away?

In Geary’s work, shapes multiply, disseminate, reunite and disappear altogether. Ghosts of past forms give way to new expressions. The energy of the previous encounters alongside the new ones all seem to still be “here.” It is a life process.

This seems particularly true in Geary’s most recent works. She has been bringing all of her experimentations to bear in large, site-specific wall paintings—the dynamism of a singular painting multiplied, the autonomy and personality of the individual shaped paintings reunited in a bubbling chorus of activity. It feels exciting to see her working in this scale. The direction makes sense. Like the various tributaries of her practice, rushing together for an ecstatic celebration. 

(1) In Katy Siegel, ed., High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975 (New York: Independent Curators International, 2006), p. 31.

(2) Mary Oliver, “At the River Clarion,” in Evidence: Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).