The Plymouth Art Guild is pleased to have the noted artist, Elizabeth Geissler offering classes at the Center for the Arts. Geissler’s class, titled “Developing your Unique Style,” enables the intermediate to advanced artist to do just that. As the title suggests, this is not your average class but rather a chance to delve deeper into yourself as an artist as well as a human being, learning in the process.
A graduate from both the museum studies program at Tufts University and the Museum of Fine Arts School, Geissler started her career as a photographer working in black and white images. During the 1980s, inspiration guided Geissler to begIn painting directly on her photos, not simply coloring them but rather slightly altering them, carefully selecting areas to pull forward or set back further into the image. The effect caught the notice of the art community and the self-described “painter” was born. After running two successful galleries simultaneously in the Hamptons, Geissler returned to the Museum School and never looked back.
Geissler’s muses are complex – the human brain and evolution – lending themselves to multilayered creations with richness and depth that beckon the viewer to come inside and stay awhile, to think about things they thought they knew in a different way. The juxtaposition of rich texture tying with smooth backgrounds is a common theme, along with the mobius and spectar images that revisit Geissler’s work. In reference to the spectar – a foreboding, futuristic symbol – Geissler states, “I paint intuitively, these things happen. It was a symbol that just appeared.”
It is Geissler’s approach that sets her apart. Students are asked to dust off primary school memory boxes, bringing along their earliest artistic endeavors for the class’s first meeting, as well as their most current work – and thus the class philosophy is born. It is Geissler’s belief that through observation of early artwork, encompassing as many years and ages as possible, there is much to glean about who we are as artists today: “In some unconscious way we are the same people we were at age 6.”
By looking at fledgling work, one gets a feeling for who they are – where they have been, what is successful and what themes reoccur – the objective being to recognize and further develop one’s own unique style.
Always moving forward, Geissler comes to the Guild fresh off a three-month residency teaching at the University Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa. Aside from working with the Trans Cultural Exchange and creating a multi-media collaboration with four other international artists, Geissler faced unexpected challenges. Usually an oil painter, Geissler found that the South African weather made watching paint dry a possible life-long endeavor. Thinking on her feet, Geissler embraced the quicker drying acrylic medium and was able to create a body of work 52 pieces deep.
