I still remember the first Phil Geiger painting I ever saw. It made a gentle but immediate impression on me and has stayed with me all these years. It was a medium-sized painting of a beat-up, under-maintained suburban athletic field with several basketball courts, rough around the edges, with tennis courts and parking lots surrounding (Basketball Game, 1982, oil, 18 x 32 in.). The complex was overseen by rows and rows of gigantic floodlights, like a set of village elders, going back in perspective into the distance. I say that it made a gentle impression on me because the ostensible subject matter was so unremarkable, so much the sort of place you walk right by on your way to someplace else. I was immediately captured by it.
The view was of the rattiest corner of this athletic complex, where the JV or the intermural players or the townies played, and no one but your friends watched. And speaking of friends watching, they were here, in small groups, eyeing the proceedings, tying laces, changing shirts, waiting their turn to play, shooting the shit. The bystanders made of this painting a kind of suburban high school version of Sunday Afternoon on the Grand Jatte.
There are, in fact, two games going on, one on the near court, with the action all the way down at the far basket, and one on a farther court. On the very right edge of the canvas is a snippet of the corner of a third court. What was amazing to me about this painting was that it was such a non-subject. This is certainly not the view that the school’s glossy brochure would display to entice prospective students. Look at the particular attention paid to the dirt and rubble around the edge of the court, right smack in the middle of the foreground. This gently sloping scree is lovingly described with its dirt, grass, or what patches of grass remain after tens of thousands of feet have shuffled on and off of this court. This foreground is a prime piece of artistic real estate, a passage Leonardo would have saved for his most beautiful wildflowers or strange plants or small animals. Instead, we are given mostly bare dirt, small stones, weeds, bits of litter, and a stray dandelion that has managed to avoid being crushed by the back and forth of thousands of sweaty, distracted feet.
To really understand what Phil is up to in this painting, we should, in good Wölfflinian manner, compare it to another contemporary painting of a basketball game, this one by another friend, Scott Noel. Scott’s Parker St. Shootaround affords us a strikingly different take on a suburban pick-up basketball game.
This is a highly classicizing figure painting (its classical aura enforced by its subtitle: “Hippomenes and Atalanta”) in which Man –and Woman- are the Measure of All Things. Scott’s painting offers a classical frieze of twenty figures and almost a dozen basketballs parading parallel to the picture plane in something in between a ballet and a stampede. You feel the bodies shuffle, jump, and jostle for position in this dense forest of limbs. Behind this first plane is yet another frieze of figures, again parallel to the picture plane.
Now, go back and look at Phil’s basketball game. The figures are decidedly smaller, Breughel-like, incidental to the tremendous feeling of space and light that the painting proffers. One way Phil does this is to move the players down to the far end of the court, where they will be smaller. Had he put the action at the near basket, all of the players would have been much bigger and would have called more attention to themselves. One immediately feels this glorious sense of space and light that opens up before us in this rundown corner of a nameless suburban field. People are clawing each other for space in Scott’s painting, while they are swimming in it in Phil’s.
Phil’s Basketball Game has stayed with me all these years, largely because it is very different from what I do. Phil stopped and made an extraordinarily compelling world out of a place I, without question, would have walked right past. Like Phil, I also paint from Nature, from what I see in front of me. But I have always been very demanding about my subjects. I distinctly remember my high school painting teacher, Francis Cunningham, criticizing a student’s still-life painting, and the question came down to the choice of objects. He said that if you painted an apple, it should be one you had grown yourself, not bought in a supermarket, and that if you painted a violin, it should be a Stradivarius. This seemed a little unreasonable to me as a 17-year-old living in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, on account of both the homegrown apple and the high-ticket violin. But I never stopped thinking about it, and I can see now that it became a core pillar in my belief system for much of my working life. What is good about that stricture is that an apple from your own tree ensures that the object is an integral and meaningful part of your life and that you didn’t have a casual, detached, or conflicted relationship to your subject matter. Having to peel off a bar code from a supermarket apple signals a barrier, a level of remove from the object, that runs counter to the feeling necessary for a meaningful painting.
Getting hold of a Stradivarius posed an even greater problem, but it signaled an attitude towards subject matter that was operative for over a thousand years, which was, that what was worth painting should itself be beautiful and worthy of attention- not cheap, badly made or tawdry. He wanted us to paint a Stradivarius for the same reason he didn’t want us to buy cheap plastic palette knives, but good metal ones with wooden handles, sturdy and well-made, that would work well and last.
I can see that in landscapes, I am also inclined towards the grand and majestic, the sort of view you have to hunt down or make some effort to find. I remember feeling very jealous of John Constable, in that all he had to do was to kick open his back door, and he was in “Constable Country.” As I grew up, the sorts of views I wanted to paint were further and further away from me in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Much of the Nature around me seemed spoiled, compromised, and defiled by what seemed to me to be our culture’s intention to make everything in our environment as ugly as possible. Finding subjects that I wanted to paint took more hunting down, traveling greater distances, being more persistent. And yet here was Phil, painting the very view I would have ignored, finding beauty and grandeur in this tiny corner of the world that I had hurried past. I should have remembered something that Constable said to a lady who had described a thing she had seen as ugly. Constable replied, ‘No madam, there is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”
Phil has always been much more democratic, taking up what he finds right around him, the sort of place I might zip right by on my way to something grander. His terrain is those nameless, anonymous places that sew the world together. His paintings urge us to stop and look at what is right around us, what is right under our noses. In this regard, Phil’s is a very radical painting and a radical and inspiring project. He brings to this project an unerring tonal sense and an unparalleled sense of light, air, and space, the very things that Constable says will always make Nature beautiful.
Ephraim Rubenstein
Ellicott City, MD
2024