Linda Geary: Could Be

By Lawrence Rinder

I was recently interviewed by a reporter from the New York Times ​​who wanted to know why textiles, African American quilts in particular, had been left out of the artistic canon. Sexism, racism, and classism, I said. I went on to say that by using textiles, artists engaged a vast, and vastly different, universe of texture, color, and formal affect. I told him that it puzzles me why anyone would willfully turn away from such a panoply of marvelous expressive means. 

Linda Geary didn’t learn her artistic chops weaving, quilting, or embroidering. She is a painter, of both large and small works that have for decades explored the medium of paint, its opacities and transparencies, the graininess of pigments and the various flowing natures of different media. Her compositions of late have referenced the architectonics of the canvas and the strange obsession of many Modernists: the flatness of the picture plane.  

Geary’s allusions to flatness consist in her incorporation of areas of generally monochrome paint juxtaposed with other such areas creating a sense that her forms have been arranged, collage-like, on a piece of paper or other flat surface. She has also often based her compositions on a suggestion of a 2-D grid: her shapes frequently go off in catawampus directions but they do so in reference to an implicit rectilinear grid.

Textiles usually, but not always, have an explicit or implicit relation to flatness, that is the kind of flatness one expects from a bed cover or tablecloth. Even textiles that eventually end up as clothes, draped this way and that over a body, carry with them a memory of their originally flat condition as fabric​​. 

It was in Rajasthan, India, that Geary encountered a kind of textile, known as Nakshi Kantha, that resonated with her own approach to painting. Originally from the Bengal region of eastern India and Bangladesh, Nakshi Kantha is a technique and style of textile production that involves piecing together a diverse array of textile fragments (often cut from old saris) which are put together with a linear ”running” stitch. In some cases, these textiles resemble the form known in the US as a “crazy quilt.” Nakshi Kantha quilts exude a cheerful insouciance untroubled by the need for regularity. 

For Geary, the relationship to her work was obvious: in Nakshi Kantha the viewer is able to enjoy the juxtaposition of harmonious but essentially unrelated textures, colors and patterns. This approach resonates strongly with her own collage aesthetic, but--due to the particular sensorial qualities of fabrics—allows for a greater range of optical timbre and tactility. She collected a large number of these quilts and when she returned to her studio in the US began to create works inspired by them. 

The small-scale pieces in the Could Be series (2018-19) are, in fact, sewn together, although they include fragments of paper and canvas as well as bits of textile. Each piece has a single, solid paper ground onto which the other elements are sewn. Geary used a sewing machine, and supplemented the stitching with spots of glue. The somewhat haphazard quality of the attachments comes off as not so much incompetent as “expressive” in the painterly sense. 

While the Could Be works incorporate a textile technique and, in their color range and compositions allude to Geary’s large-scale paintings, the fact that they are constructed on small pieces of paper is suggestive of collage. Collage can be traced back thousands of years to precedents in China and Japan however, Geary’s approach is most clearly foreshadowed by the Cubist experiments of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the early 20​th​ century. These artists explored the marvelousness of fragments while welcoming into their compositions’ diverse materials such as bits of newspaper or chair cane alongside more traditional media like paint and graphite. As it evolved (especially among the Surrealists), collage became primarily a medium of combined—often found—pieces of paper. 

By wedding painting, collage, and textile design, Geary has drawn on the strengths of each idiom to achieve a result that is fresh and energetic. Her openness to seeing Nakshi Kantha quilts as art​ ​, enables her to draw from them important lessons in color and composition. Ultimately, though, perhaps the most important thing she learned from these Indian textiles was the joy of play in the space of what could be.