Curriculum Vitae | Artist's Statement | Exhibit List
Geoffrey Stein: A studio practice in transition
My work is about the basic, primal process of putting pigment on a flat surface. I paint to find out what I think about the world; to discover the things I cannot put into words. I savor the slips of the hand that express one’s unconscious feelings about the person being painted.
In making paintings, I utilize collage as a formal element; a way of putting down a tone or of erasing previous marks. I use sanding as a way of drawing with the collaged material and paint. Sanding can be a way of retrieving previous layers of the work or blending traces of old layers with fresh paint.
In a finished work, the secondary meaning of the text or image collaged becomes an important part of the work. In my Irrational Exuberance series, I used collage material from, among others, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times of London, The New York Times and the legal complaints against Madoff to create paintings of participants in the credit crunch.