Geoffrey Stein
Geoffrey Stein (USA) An artist statement
“I am a figurative painter
who prefers to work from life when possible. I paint to find out what I think about the world; to discover the things I do not have words for. I savor the slips of the hand that express one's unconscious feelings. I am interested in the tension between abstraction and realism. I do not want to make an academic copy of the model or a photorealistic illustration. My paintings explore the tension between what needs to be shown and what does not, the seen and the unseen.
“In my studio practice I utilize collage as a formal element; a way of putting down tone or erasing previous marks. There is a randomness in collage, a secondary meaning in the text or image, that becomes an important part of the finished work.
She
Collage provides a method of capturing the fast-paced, often fragmented moving images of our 21st Century postmodern culture. It brings together multiple images and text from multiple sources into a final portrait. Collage is a way of capturing time that allows me to layer multiple images over the scaffolding of a drawing.
People were being buffeted by forces beyond their control that they could not understand. Scary times. I started the portraits of actors involved in the credit crunch by gathering and collaging material from the subjects' worlds. For Madoff, the legal complaints against him, and text from the Wall Street Journal for Greenspan, Geithner, and Bernake. When the Dodd-Frank Act was passed, I returned to the series from a new perspective, using text from the bill to create a portrait of Elizabeth Warren.(Geoffrey Stein)
“I began my
“Irrational Exuberance” portrait series in 2009 when the US economy seemed to be in danger of shutting down.
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