Geoffrey Hunter
Hunter’s most recent paintings continue his exploration of the relationship between painting and digital media through color, texture, and surface. The first step of the process begins with older paintings or past images – sometimes historical images, sometimes the artist’s own work. Through a series of underpainting and overpainting, adding and subtracting, canceling and editing, the final work emerges.
For Geoffrey Hunter, the process of painting is archaeological. Archaeology is the uncovering of what has been lost: all the conceits of modernist purity, transcendence, and identity. The archaeologist transforms remnants into treasure: the debris of civilization is categorized, named, and classified, until it finally becomes Art. These works are a conglomeration of mistakes, erasures, forgotten gestures and the debris of a visual culture found in books, manuals, science, video games, even the Internet. Similar to society’s reliance on the computer, the computer has become an important tool for the artist. While the computer becomes the inward focus to a microcosmic realm, Hunter’s paintings reach outward to a macrocosmic phantasmagoria. Painting becomes the outward convergence to a macrocosmic combination of real and imagined images. This evolution from copier, to projector, to computer has fueled Hunter’s fascination with the cultural and aesthetic importance of imagery.
Hunter’s most recent paintings continue his exploration of the relationship between painting and digital media through color, texture, and surface. The first step of the process begins with older paintings or past images – sometimes historical images, sometimes the artist’s own work. Through a series of underpainting and overpainting, adding and subtracting, canceling and editing, the final work emerges.
Of his work, Hunter states:
“I find and build paintings, using numerous image-sources, texts, line drawings, and photos. I represent the world using these sources. I filter and process these sources to generate paintings.Images relating to reality, and the smallest of details that do not have a story but could if attention is given, are prevalent in my work. I am releasing control of what a traditional painting is. The viewer will be free, allowing him or her to construct and add meaning to his or her own vision. I would like to challenge the viewer to find meaning within my abstract forms.”
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Geoffrey Hunter received his Diploma of Visual Arts from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, AB, in 1986. His paintings have been widely exhibited across Canada and Europe. Hunter’s artwork has been collected by Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Art Gallery of Alberta, Bow Valley College, Department of External Affairs, Canada, Le Germain Hotels, RBC, University of Calgary and Telus Communications, to name a few.
