Geometric Expressionism

I coined the phrase Geometric Expressionism to refer to my use of geometry to restrain emotion in a way that heightens the cognitive consideration of the subject. 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 manipulate emotional engagement.

Admittedly, I think artists have subconsciously used geometry for its restraining power for thousands of years. For example, Pablo Picasso's weeping women series, done in a Cubist style, has a strange emotional affect on the viewer; 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 portrait 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 an artist 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. In short, the intended aim of the theory, and the belief in the validity of the theory, clouded what the artists' subconscious desires.

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. In 1915, 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 (unless he was being ironic in his manifesto.)

Kasimir Malevich Black Square 1915

I have to confess that I 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. Likewise, 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. There is some emotion in them, as there is emotion in everything, but not much.

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 a 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. Far from escaping illusory social constructs, they had blindfolded themselves with them.

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", geometric 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 assassin from Scarface. The fact that I would be reminded of two different characters that looked nothing alike got me hypothesising that perhaps the brain codes memories as a combination of symbols, colours and shapes. For example, when we think of a Cyberman, we create an image from a set of building blocks which may later be used to create another character with a large percentage of the same building blocks. Furthermore, whatever image we create will perhaps be biased towards emotional memory over visual memory. In other words, we don’t remember what something looks like as much as we remember what something feels like.

 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 who obeys without question, such as an assassin, cyberman, or household servant, is intimidating. Additionally, I wondered about the kind of circumstances that may encourage us to restrain emotion in ourselves.

Servant, a cyberman and Alberto

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. Basically, their clinical analysis sterilises whatever emotions they feel and in some ways makes them act inhuman.

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. I did a further two paintings, Sugar Dady and the Magician, using the top hat as a central symbol that used shapes to create a kind of feeling representing the title of the painting.

The Fragile State of Being (2008)

Sugar Dady (2008)

The Magician (2008)

After the top hat series, 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 if written by a scientist trying sound enlightened, 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 got the feeling that I had no talent for art and needed 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, and feel even less adequate in comparison.

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 my own self-doubt. 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.

Vincent 12

Vincent 10

Vincent 4

After finishing my van Gogh series, I did one painting about his best mate, Gauguin. I used geometry to contrast Gauguin’s profile as a stockbroker before he became an artist with that of an artist living in Tahiti. After completing the one painting, I felt the style and the subject had been resolved enough and it was time to move on.

Gauguin; a Stockbroker and an Artist

When writing my manifesto, I went searching for some kind of research to verify my theories. From the realms of neuroscience, I found that Japanese researchers were able to ascertain whether subjects were looking at a cubist painting by Picasso or a fluid painting by Dali by scans of their brains alone. (Yamamura, Hiromi; Sawahata, Yasuhito; Yamamoto, Miyuki; Kamitani, Yukiyasu, Neural art appraisal of painter: Dali or Picasso? NeuroReport: 9 December 2009 - Volume 20 - Issue 18 - pp 1630-1633)

From the realms of Human Resources, I found that there was a field known as psychogeometrics, which indicated that shapes had strong communicative power and could be used to predict personality based on people’s favourites shape. Specifically, when asked to look at a circle, square, rectangle, triangle, or squiggly line and then choose which one best represents their personality, the choice people was found to have around 87% accuracy. Circle personalities tended to be of the caring social worker variety. Squares liked rules. Rectangles were logical engineers that worked in teams. Triangles were scientists. The squiggly lines were the right brain creatives, such as artists or salesmen.

From the realms of architecture, I found theories about how mood could be expressed with line and shape. Circular shapes were associated with tenderness, friendship, support, protection and compassion. These connotations could be seen in Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, which uses rectangular shapes to symbolise earth, and circular shapes to represent heaven. Vertical shapes and lines were used to convey feelings of masculinity, strength, brutality and domination. Examples could be found in Greece’s Parthenon. Sharp angled lines were believed to create feelings of energy, liveliness, violence, explosiveness and anger.

From art, I found that Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of his and Gauguin’s chairs were interpreted to be reflective of each’s  personality. Specifically, Vincent’s chair was rough and workmanlike while Gauguin’s chair was curvaceous, and the two books gave a more robust quality to the man who sat in it.

Vincent Van Gogh: Vincent Van Gogh's Chair 1988	Vincent Van Gogh: Gauguin's Chair with Books and Candle 1988

Also from art I found ideas in reactions to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. While the square and circle were intended by Da Vinci to communicate proportion in a mathematical sense, their psychological associations communicated something different. Through time, Vitruvian Man has come to symbolize universal humanity. For many, the balance of the physical figure represented with a square and a circle, combined with triangular bodily forms, has come to symbolize the spiritual proportion of an enlightened being.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man

 From the realms of speculative psychology, I found Carl Jung's theories on archetypes. Jung was particularly interested in the mandala, a pairing of a circle and square that kept being portrayed across cultures and across time. Jung proposed:

"The "squaring of the circle" is one of the most archetypal motifs which form the basic patterns of our dreams and fantasies. But it is distingquished by the fact that it is one of the most important of them from the functional point of view. Indeed, it could even be called the archetype of wholeness."

Although the research informed my thinking, none of it was able to verify my thinking. Consequently, 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 is only a fraction of what we really are, and that needs to be kept in mind.

As well as seeing the problems in being reliant upon theory in psychology, I see how reliance upon manifestos has caused problems in art. Many cubist painters may have created vastly superior work if they had not consciously anchored themselves around a belief that they used geometry because they were just experimenting with perspective. Likewise, the supremacists blinded themselves with their manifesto that proposed that, by painting shapes, they were escaping illusory social constructs. Not only was their belief a construct, but their shapes communicated a shared understanding as much as the letters ABCD or an apple.

While I appreciate that that our conscious mind is only a fraction of what we really are, and the dangers of being too reliant on theory, I also understand the importance of reflection, and in trying to understand those things which are currently mysteries. We must search for meaning, but always keep in mind that our conclusions may be wrong.

Chad Swanson email: chad@lonelycolours.com