Geometric Expressionism

I am not the first person to extensively use geometry in art, but as far as I have been able to ascertain, I am the first to say that I use geometry for its symbolic qualities and its power to restrain emotions.  

Admittedly, I think artists for thousands of years have subconsciously used geometry for its restraining power. For example, Pablo Picasso's weeping women series, done in a Cubist style, has a strange emotional affect on the viewer. Specifically, the use of geometry makes looking at them feel like looking at a woman's tears in an intellectual way. There is emotion in the paintings, but the geometric restraint gives it a kind of tension that wouldn’t be felt in a nude characterised by flowing lines.

Pablo Picasso Weeping Woman

Just as emotional restraint can be seen in Picasso’s paintings, it can also be seen in the cubist propaganda paintings of the Soviet Union. Defend USSR is a good example of a painting that used geometry to convey strength and to communicate stoic soldiers who had closed down their emotional realms.

Defend USSR

Although emotional restraint may have been an outcome of the the Cubist style used by Picasso and Communist painters, the theory of Cubism was always high in their consciousness and governed what they produced. Specifically, Cubism was created with the intention of portraying a mosaic of perspectives in a 2d plane. This theory is demonstrated in Picasso's Weeping Woman, which shows a man who has looked at a woman from multiple angles and then combined those angles into the one scene. The theory is also demonstrated in Defend USSR where the theory of Cubism has been honoured by compressing fighter planes and factories into the same 2 dimensional plane occupied by marching soldiers.

While the manipulation of emotions was a side effect of Cubism, it was a concious goal of Supremacist and Geometric Abstractionist painters; however, their intention was to disconnect from all references to reality in order to attain emotional freedom, not to restrain emotion. Kasmir Malevich pioneered the movement by painting a black square and writing a manifesto stating:

"Hence, to the Suprematist, the appropriate means of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects.

Objectivity, in itself, is meaningless to him; the concepts of the conscious mind are worthless. Feeling is the determining factor ... and thus art arrives at non objective representation at Suprematism...Everything which determined the objective ideal structure of life and of "art' ideas, concepts, and images all this the artist has cast aside in order to heed pure feeling... Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of "things."

In more simple language, by moving away from realistic objects and context, Suprematism aimed to facilitate a cognitive desert in which the audience could create pure feeling that was uncorrupted by socially constructed meaning. Paradoxically, creating work that was disconnected from reality left Malevich's viewers confused about how they should feel. To lessen their confusion, Malevich used artist statements to tell them how they should feel. In other words, he used socially constructed language to shape the feelings of his viewers as they looked at his visual creations.That artist statement also guided Malevich as he created his paintings.

Kasimir Malevich Black Square 1915

I have to confess that I really don’t feel much emotion when looking at the Black Square. The colour black is generally worn by people in mourning as a way of shutting down their emotional realm to deal with their pain. In schools, squares refer to those students who avoid the temptation of their emotions to follow rules diligently. Finally, to retreat from reality is to retreat into a world that is safe. Emotional intensity can be found in paintings by Evard Munch or Vincent van Gogh that are most clearly anchored in the context of reality. Geometric Abstraction has no reality to provoke memories or confusion, which is why the paintings are commonly found in hotels, corporate offices and parliamentary chambers. For lack of a better word, they are the Big Macs of the art world because they are so emotionally neutral.

I personally think Malevich was on a worthy pursuit when he started experimenting with shapes, but he created a manifesto that incorrectly explained what he was doing. This in turn misled himself and century of artists who likewise misunderstood what they were doing. In other words, their reason for painting had become obscured by the collective accumulation of a Malevich manifesto.

Geometric Hand (2000)

Geometric Hand (2000) was my first Geometric Expressionist painting. At the time of painting it, I had no conscious intent to restrain emotions nor any theoretical understanding of the Geometric Expressionist style that I would later turn into a manifesto. I was in a period of painting hands because I found something extremely expressive about them. Simultaneously, I was also fighting my artistic energy, which I believed was distracting me from vocational pursuits. In hindsight, I think Geometric Hand showed that geometric form is to shape what black and white is to colour. Just as a black and white photo of a nude lady is stripped of its emotion allowing it to be more about intellectual "art" than lustful "pornography", geometry forms constrain emotion to heighten logical  rather than emotional consideration. I was trying to fight my expressive desires and Geometric Hand was a product of that battle.

Braddo, John was my next Geometric Expressionist painting. I had become friends with John after he bought some of my paintings and asked me to paint him. Rather than paint what he looked like, I painted the feelings I got from him. His life had contributed to him being a particularly complex character. He had been conscripted to fight in Vietnam and his experiences were still haunting him. He was also a committed Christian and had recently survived a near death experience. I think a lot of his Christian ethic was also driving him to sit on the boards of many of Canberra’s charitable organisations as he expressed his desire to help others. Finally, he was an extremely perceptive judge of character, and had way of reading me which was very close to the mark. This was actually quite intimidating because there is a certain loss of power by being understood.

When I look back at the painting I created, I think I had picked up on the way he was restraining some of his emotions concerning his past. I also think I was restraining myself in my dealings with him.

Braddo, John (2000)

For a number of years, geometry disappeared from my art. It returned in 2007 when I was doing a doodle that made me think of a servant. After I filled the doodle out with colour, I realised that the image reminded me of a cross between the Dr Who Cyberman and Alberto, the assassion from Scarface. The fact that I would be reminded of two different characters that looked nothing alike got me hypothesising that perhaps the brain encodes memories as a combination of symbols, colours and shapes. When we think of cyberman, we create an image from a set of building blocks which may later be used to create a character with a large percentage of the same building blocks.

 Aside making me think of how memories may be created, the Servant got me interested in the way we approach emotion. Specifically, I wondered why someone without emotion, such as a an assassin, cyberman, or obedient servant, is intimidating. Additionally, I wondered about the kind of circumstances that may encourage us to restrain emotion ourselves.

As I continued to think of the question, I produced the Psychologist. It was a painting that made me think of the irony of psychologists creating logical theories to explain why their patients were not acting logically. It also got me wondering why some of the most mixed up people I’ve met in life have been trained in psychology (I've been trained in pyschology as well.) I hypothesised that perhaps psychologists rely upon their theories as a kind of defence mechanism that helps them remain emotionally detached from their patients.

The Psychologist (2007)

After the Psychologist, I painted The Fragile State of Being. As I looked at it, I was reminded of the British nobility's stiff upper lip. I then thought that their ability to live has been repressed by their culture of rigid formality. In addition, I was inspired to think of the meaning of art itself. To appreciate art, I thought it was necessary to be able to appreciate both the intangible as well as the ability of something to disrupt any kind of equilibrium formed through formality or social conventions.

The Fragile State of Being (2008)

After the Fragile State of Being, I launched into a series of 20 paintings based on the self-portraits of Vincent van Gogh. At the time I didn’t think much about my actions; I just painted and painted and 20 paintings later I stopped painting.

In 2009, I put in a submission to exhibit them. As part of the submission, I needed to come up with a logical explanation for why I had painted 20 paintings and now wanted to exhibit them. I wrote my Geometric Expressionist Manifesto and said that I was interested in how Vincent van Gogh was portrayed in art versus how he was portrayed in psychology journals. It was all very logical, as most artist statements are.

In hindsight, I think that such a question would have been too boring to motivate me to paint one portrait, let alone 20. I think the truth was that I was intimidated by both Vincent’s life story and his art. In regards to his life story, he was just so passionate that he had me questioning my own depth of commitment to art. He would paint at night with candles on his head, and go without food so he had money to buy art supplies. Would I make the same sacrifices for art? Probably not. I think part of me reacted to Vincent’s passion the same way his superiors in the Church reacted when he showed excessive devotion to his job as a Christian pastor. His superiors saw him take the shirt off his own back to give to the poor, and such commitment made them question their own faith and devotion to the cause. To deal with their emotional difficulties, they fired him. Such an option wasn't available to me to so I had to do something else.

In regards to his art, it was just so good that it made me feel inadequate and jealous. Sometimes when I looked at his paintings I just get the feeling that I have no talent for art and need to give the game away. His landscapes burst with emotional intensity and love for the world around him. His self-portraits also had an emotional intensity about them, but they were also heavily restrained. This gave them a cognitive dimension that made me appreciate them even more.

When I looked at Vincent’s portraits, I saw some of the things he saw, but overlaid with Vincent's vision were my emotional pains of jealousy of his abilities and the self-doubt at my own passion being undermined. These emotions stirred in me a desire for some kind of cathartic resolution, which came out in a desire to paint those portraits, but restrain how I felt.

As I read my Geometric Expressionism Manifesto, I wonder if I am as guilty in thinking that I can explain art with a written statement as the psychologist who thinks the human mind can be explained with a theory. I feel that our conscious mind that finds expression with the defined logic expressed in words is only a fraction of what we really are. I understand the importance of reflection, but even more I understand the importance of that which we do not understand, but try to.

Vincent 12

Vincent 10

Vincent 4

Chad Swanson email: chad@lonelycolours.com