Settled in a career using computer-aided design for machinery tools at Boeing, Geoffrey Gersten discovered fine art. He says, “I saw an etching in a book which looked like a drafting drawing that had exploded. It was an abstraction of lines. I had seen what I had been doing as geometry and began to see it as fine art for the first time.”
Lead Me Down to the Ocean, oil on canvas, 60 x 40"
I heard of a saint who had loved you, oil on canvas, 39½ x 60"
Gersten adds, “I never looked at art growing up. It was not part of my family. I then began studying art history, stumbling from one period to another. I loved abstract art for a while and then discovered the beautiful glazing of the Dutch Golden Age. I wanted to paint like a Dutch master.” His whimsical, surreal paintings of animals and robots in brightly colored settings of parallel universes have been exhibited from Taiwan to Madrid.
Vogue 1939, oil on canvas, 60 x 48"
“A visit to the Prado in Madrid was a turning point, however,” he explains. “I knew I wanted to be more expressive than whimsical. Years ago I started saving vintage photographs from the ’30s and ’40s because I liked how they looked but I never tried to paint them. I later saw an exhibition of a painter from the ’70s who blew up photographs and painted the banality of everyday life so gorgeously. My wife, Amelia, is an artist who specializes in black-and-white photography. It was all new to me. I went to an exhibition of Irving Penn’s large black-and-white portrait photographs in New York and saw that the right lighting and setting and a total lack of color can make things more dramatic.”
As it Happened, oil on canvas, 40 x 60"
He began blowing up images from his vintage photo collection. Lead Me Down to the Ocean is a 60-by-40-inch canvas in black and white. “I was painting dogs at the time so I added the Dalmatian to the original photograph,” he explains. As in the paintings of the Dutch masters and the work of contemporary photorealists, the verisimilitude from a distance dissolves into lush abstractions of paint up close. “It’s like sculpting with paint. I don’t want it to look like a photo” he exclaims.
A tiny color photograph from his collection had very little detail. It has evolved into a 40-by-60-inch canvas, As it Happened. “As
I blew it up,” he says, “it came down to a composition of shapes of color.”
Both paintings are in an exhibition of his new works at Bonner David Galleries in Scottsdale, Arizona, January 16 through February 17.
Bonner David Galleries
7040 E. Main Street • Scottsdale, AZ 85251
(480) 949-8500 • www.bonnerdavid.com
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