Geoffrey Stein

My work is about the basic, primal process of putting pigment on a flat surface. I paint to find out what I think about the world; to discover the things I cannot put into words. I savor the slips of the hand that express one’s unconscious feelings about the person being painted.

In making paintings, I utilize collage as a formal element; a way of putting down a tone or of erasing previous marks. I use sanding as a way of drawing with the collaged material and paint. Sanding can be a way of retrieving previous layers of the work or blending traces of old layers with fresh paint. In a finished work, the secondary meaning of the text or image collaged becomes an important part of the work. I used collage material from the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the legal complaints against Madoff to create these paintings of participants in the credit crunch.