Description

Geoff Allen as an artist, plein air painting allows my art to showcase two of my greatest passions:  my enthusiasm for being outdoors and the beauty of watercolor.  Plein air painting helps me focus intensely on my work while promoting a sense of mystery and spontaneity. 

To borrow Alfred Korzybski’s phrase “the map is not the territory”, meaning the map is merely a plan and the “territory” is reacting in the moment whatever the conditions may be. 

In the studio, as artists, we practice, plan and evaluate our art within an open time constraint. However, in a plein air practice we become vulnerable to time, the whims of nature, and interact within a social environment. This adversity though is necessary to experience the primary source of the subject (nature) and reality, experiencing “the territory”.

Watercolor echos this idea of immediacy and nature.  I find that watercolor is both medium and metaphor, and at times both a blessing and a curse.  I love that aspect of art making- when something is slightly out of my control and a challenge. It allows me to feel that I am playing with mysterious forces beyond my own understanding.

My art journey began unconventionally.  I graduated with a bachelors in Economics, with a passion at the time for black and white street photography culminating in 1986 with a solo exhibition at the Reno Art Museum called “Suburban Views”. 

My most pivotal moment as an artist came during a postgraduate summer watercolor class. The class was plein air painting in the Sierras during July when it began snowing on us, I was thrilled and hooked.

Soon after, I graduated with an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 1990, and thrusted myself into the urban grind and contemporary art scene of Los Angeles. Initially working as a scenic painter in Hollywood and residing in a downtown studio, life felt exhilarating but there wasn’t much time for art.  Luckily I began to teach drawing and ran several college galleries. My art at the time was poured pastel sculptural wall reliefs. Instead of brushes, I used poured plaster, fiberglass, and syringes filled with acrylic. This work resulted in a solo exhibition at Post Gallery, on Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles in 2001. As different as all these experiences may seem, I have found the connecting threads to plein air. 

Currently I am living in a beautiful coastal town north of San Diego. I left the complexity of Los Angeles and began an illustration business with my wife, Jennifer Brinley, who was my high school girlfriend who I met in art class. Looking back on my career in art, it was always about making art to fit into preexisting categories or labels: be it contemporary art, modern art, abstraction, conceptual, performance, installation, illustration, folk art, or commercial. Whereas my focus now—the tradition of  plein air painting, feels more about an appreciation of life, nature and transforming that excitement onto paper.