Linda Geary

Interview by Jordan Stein

The dumpster outside Linda Geary’s Oakland studio is a magical place; it’s not only where an awful lot of work gets trashed, but it’s also where patterns, textures, and colors become unstuck from particular canvases and recycled into future paintings. Not literally. You see, she’s so prolific that the dumpster actually allows her to save ideas, like a mint for immaterial coins. One reason she’s not precious or sentimental about letting a work go is because the thing itself isn’t all that important in the end. That said, on the way toward death—or the afterlife—all paintings get photographed. She may look at it, she may not. Either way, she’d rather not live with so much stuff.

Her process is so affirmative that at the time of this book trilogy’s conception, there was no content for the third installment. “What do you suppose will be in there?” I ask her. “Things that don’t exist yet,” she tells me.

I’ve come to imagine these books as a river midstream, the translation or approximation of a practice that iterates at an astonishing pace. The questions Geary wrestles with just can’t wait, and she races back to the studio each morning with an admirable, if not bewildering, vitality.

The interview that follows took place in the artist’s Oakland studio on a sunny October day in 2019. On my first visit there, nearly a year before that, I confessed that I didn’t know much about painting. “Me neither!” she hollered.

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Interviewer: As funky as it may be to begin with a koan, or a paradox or something…if the work is never finished, does the work ever begin? I wonder if these books are a challenge you gave yourself—three catalogs of uniform size—a challenge to freeze your process for a moment in time, almost like a yearbook. Your process seems to carry a natural resistance to being stuck. From where do you suppose the impulse arrived to stick it?
Linda: It’s like a yearbook. I wanted to document many different bodies of work and see how all they relate to each other. I just want to keep working all the time. That’s what keeps me excited and feeling like I’m moving the work along. I’m generating more clarity as time goes on.
Interviewer: The idea for three catalogs came pretty early.
Linda: I think of my work as large, small, and in-between, like three channels related to scale and speed. While there are a lot of categories within those channels, that’s how I think about it. The large paintings on canvas are slower and the works on paper are fast, and three is a good number, it’s like infinity.
Interviewer: That’s a nice idea.
Linda: It’s from Duchamp. Three equals infinity.
Interviewer: Not a single thing, and not a duality. It’s not divisible.
Linda: It’s like arranging flowers in odd numbers or hanging small works on a wall. “Once you have three you have three million. It’s the same as three”, that’s Duchamp.
Interviewer: You knew it had to be three and you made space in your mind for whatever that would be, and that’s changed a number of times since we first spoke.
Linda: The 3rd book was originally going to be about a group of small paintings and other artists coming in to my studio to choose different groupings. Then it was about architectural facades in Oakland. But then I got into making the large wall paintings, and it was just obvious the 3rd book would be a synthesis of all the work leading to that. Those other books will come later. I made a giant wall painting at facebook, and in building up to it I had a few large experiments painting directly on my studio walls. After the facebook project ended, I raced back to my studio to continue the momentum I started there. A lot of new moves and experiments came out of that project. The work is fast and huge, and more related to the works on paper. And more social because it’s in a public permanent space. So when I got back to the studio I felt more permission to keep working in this way that felt almost ecstatic.
Interviewer: It’s nice how the bigger and slower the work becomes, it hits a threshold and becomes fast again. Closing the loop feels like a “three” thing, or an infinity thing somehow.
Linda: Yes.
Interviewer: Why do you suppose the process felt so ecstatic for you?
Linda: I was a bit terrified. I felt a bit in over my head. I didn’t want to plan it out, but the scale was so much larger than I’ve worked before and there was a time constraint. I talked to people I know who’ve done giant wall works before, like Alicia McCarthy, who came over one day. She stayed for five hours and we didn’t talk about painting much, maybe five minutes, and then she just said, “I think spray paint and big brushes.” We talked about everything else, it was the longest studio visit. I realized later we didn’t even talk about art, but when she left, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And so I decided that I wouldn’t care so much about what it looks like. Maybe that wouldn’t matter so much.
Interviewer: That’s a very Linda thing to say. Tell me more.
Linda: On one level, it’s obviously important. The vibration and color is important, and the color and the weight and all the formal elements matters. I’m working out the visual problems and then letting go, and I have to be ok with letting it go. Its more like being a channel for energy, and working with a critical mindset that is more dialed back, a lighter touch.
Interviewer: Like if you take too big of a role in determining what it looks like you’ll somehow fuck up what it’s supposed to look like?
Linda: Yes.
Interviewer: You once said to me, gesturing around the room, that “these things just happen to be paintings.” Could they be other things? The process is obviously physical for you and it yields this physical stuff, but you also talk about these very ephemeral and metaphysical subjects. Does paint feel just like one way to bring feelings into reality?
Linda: I relate to the process of acting: getting into a character and the difference between forcing something to come and actually embodying a character and living it. There are narratives in acting and character development that I’m interested in as a painter. My paintings are not about a visible narrative, but I’m interested in psychological or literary narratives about transformation. It just happens to be painting because I fell in love with painting and that was that.
Interviewer: The narrative you’re talking about concerns the collective psyche, architecture, uncertainty, mirroring—things that you mention in the introduction to this book. It’s not exactly narrative, like in a short story, but it’s obviously connected to bigger ideas and themes that are not in the painting.
Linda: Sometimes it’s more like building a house than it is about painting in layers. Building a painting is like putting together a foundation. It’s very structural. I also think of the structural and transformation part is connected to students and teaching. A student comes in and moves through four years, and they’re not the same person at the end. As a student who’s like 18 to 21, it’s so dynamic. It’s such an amazing time and to be in that process with students is a privilege—it’s empowering for them, but it’s also inspiring to be in that process with them. Students are sponges in a way that they’re not at any other time. And while I’m their teacher, I think of myself as more like one of them. As an artist I sometimes resist the teacher, professor, chair thing. I am all of those things, but I’m also just another student with them, trying to figure out my own artistic path, too. Students just want someone to speak clearly about being an artist. That’s all they want. And to be given permission. Permission to be human.
Interviewer: How many distinct bodies of work do you have?
Linda: Living or dead? [laughs] Because some of them are—
Interviewer: Inactive?
Linda: Some of them are thrown away.
Interviewer: But is it fair to say that all these catalogs are different?
Linda: The architecture and speed is different in all three. Yes Way is slow, larger paintings, and more like house building. Sidewalks is moving fast and in numbers, in order to cover a certain amount of ground. River is an alphabet of shapes and speed, and the synthesis of the other two. I didn’t plan it that way but that’s how it turned out. I would say each catalog has about four to seven bodies of work, some don’t exist anymore.
Interviewer: Some don’t exist anymore, but they appear in the catalog as photographs.
Linda: Yes. Well, some of them, a few. I throw work away because the studio is a psychic space. I don’t like having a lot of stored work in my space because I feel like I want to keep moving forward rather than look back. If they’re in the books, I might not throw them out. I’m always thinking, “I want these to get better and better.”
Interviewer: I find it inspiring that a work doesn’t need to look a certain way, or doesn’t even need to be a painting. I interpret it as more of a constant regeneration that crosses over into Eastern philosophies, maybe an ego destruction or something. Why am I holding on to absolutely everything I’ve ever touched, when what I’m trying to learn and how I’m trying to grow is really ephemeral?
Linda: I remember we talked last year about the object-ness of the painting and how it doesn’t align with the idea of going after something that’s completely intangible. I don’t need the actual painting after it’s done. Some artists are very attached to their work. Most artists are like, “My studio, if there was a fire and everything I made—” I actually, when I hear that—I think I would be fine if that happened. [laughter] I’m getting what I need out of making the work. And of course I don’t want my studio to burn down, and I love that people are living with my work.
Interviewer: What does it felt like to share you works in public?
Linda: Kind of panicky. That’s what these books are about, allowing the panic and letting people in. I’m getting better at it.
Interviewer: You spoke about how bodies of work represent different ways of looking, like peering down over water or the sidewalk. Tell me about the sightlines, especially in relation to how we think the books are going down.
Linda: Yes Way is more about building up, building vertically, building houses. It is slower and about constructing or stacking things. Sidewalks is about walking fast, looking down and around, working on paper on a table, bodies in space, moving in different directions, moving forward and covering a lot of ground and sightlines moving all over the place. And River is where they’re all moving together and getting caught up in each other, accumulating and letting things go in a forward moving direction. It’s also about magnifying things. Blowing them up. If you blow something up you can actually see what you’re trying to do.
Interviewer: Tell me about the first sentence in the Yes Way statement, about disbelief.
Linda: It’s about the unbelievable, and the process of creating forward-moving paths even though I may not know how I’m getting there. It’s about creating a sense of meaning through the act of blind optimism.