R. Geoffrey Blackburn
I have done art my entire life. It is my "magnetic north" - no matter what else I do; it always tacks back to art - one way or another. My grandfather was an artist so, it's in the genes. When I was very young, (2nd-3rd grade) and lived in Laguna Beach, CA, I painted sea creatures, underwater scenes, sailing ships, and various scenes of a giant squid attacking the submarine Nautilus. Later, when we moved inland, I drew and painted landscapes, cityscapes, and various figurative, pieces. In 1966, I hitchhiked to New York City, en route to Nova Scotia where I had intended to sign on to a freighter and work my way to Le Havre, France, jump ship, and hitchhike to Paris and do art on the Left Bank. For various reasons, I ended up building swimming pools in upstate New York and almost ended up immigrating to Australia instead – but that's another story… (19-year-old brain at work here…) I never made it out of the States, but I did get to see an astonishing Salvador Dali exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum which totally blew my mind, as we used to say. In the 60s I reaffirmed that I was actually a Surrealist, and did several very strange paintings including a psychedelic skier’s series. During the 1970's I was fortunate to have lived and worked near Moab, UT, which was how I came to cherish and thus focus on red rock landscapes-which in and of themselves are surreal. Although I have had some formal training, I am essentially self-taught. my art has hung in the White House and appeared on national television. In 1987, I invented a new, user-interactive art form for which I received a US Patent in 1990. My inner Surrealist survives in this new artwork. My painting, "Two Hawks is a morning scene from the White Rim trail- a 103-mile dirt road that runs under Dead Horse Point west of Moab, Utah. I have done a number of scenes along this road. It has amazingly diverse geological structures and the colors are astonishing! This particular formation is almost impossible to spot from the road, indeed the only visibly distinguishable part is the very top of the pillar and if you don't happen to see it at exactly the right moment, it is gone before you know it. This painting took me a brain-numbing 1673 hours to paint. (I actually keep track of the hours). I could have done the Sistine Chapel… so why you might wonder did it take so bloody long?! Well, for one thing, I learned (at about 1000 hours in) that I had cataracts in both eyes that radically affected my ability to see blues and purples. Big Shock. I had the cataracts removed in July of 2016. Then I saw my painting for the first time. I had another BIGGER SHOCK. The colors were so far off from what I thought I was painting, that I had to make significant adjustments to much of the painting. Also, more importantly, I kept discovering/creating new spaces in the painting that I could go into and explore. It was absolutely fascinating. So, into my painting, I went. I literally spent my time creating space to go into. The more time I spent, the more space I created. It's been a strange, lonely, amazing, even metaphysical experience. Every day for months I thought I'd be finishing the next day only to be confounded by a new discovery that I just had to explore. I had even painted the 2016 date on the piece but had to paint that out as I ended up well into 2017 before I finally called it done. Boy, talk about OCD… Think about it, I've looked at this image, basically 1/25 of a second, for nearly 1700 hours and am STILL discovering amazing things in the scene...Hmmm..." In 1988 I created and subsequently patented in 1990, an entirely new user-interactive artform. Sadly, due to its myriad technical complexities and the fact that it involves several different technologies and disciplines, I have not yet been able to pursue this invention as I had hoped. Stay tuned. I first have to clone myself… What I am seeking to do with my paintings, is to create a doorway that allows you to step through the surface of the painting and into the scene - have you explore its spaces, and feel like you are actually there. I want you to smell the desert flora and feel the crunch of the sand under your boots - everywhere you look, there's something new to discover. The tight detail in my work makes this possible. I paint "thin"– using very little paint, layering thin transparent colors on top of each other so you can “look into” the rock. With looser more "painterly" work, the viewer is stopped at the surface of the painting. I paint the various desert creatures as you would actually discover them in nature – not as the main focus, but rather as a part of the greater whole. Having spent nearly a decade living and exploring the desert canyons with geologists, my work is geologically accurate and often collected by mining companies. I paint a scene the way you might remember it versus the way it actually is.
