We’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be featuring a painting by Melbourne-based painter Jeremy Geddes for the cover of our Spring 2014 issue. One critic has described Geddes’s work as “awesome, and not the casual slang use of awesome, but its original meaning, which is to stand there gaping open mouthed and feeling totally overwhelmed.”
Geddes has won admiration and acclaim for his jaw-dropping paintings of figures at the mercy of invisible forces: cosmonauts plummeting to earth or floating through abandoned cities, everyday people suspended in the air or hurled through windows or walls, pigeons drifting in the vacuum of space. Geddes has also been awarded the Spectrum Gold Award for his cover art for the comic Doomed; his children’s book, The Mystery of Eilean Mor, also won the Crichton Award and was shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards.
The painstaking attention to detail in Geddes’s work have led some to dub him a hyperrealist. Geddes states that he has always been “drawn to realism,” despite a bias against the approach in the contemporary art world. Geddes is aware that his blending of the photorealistic and the surreal has appeal well beyond the walls of galleries and the pages of exhibit books, and he is not surprised that his work has found an audience “beyond the bubble of the ‘art world.’” A realistic approach, he argues, retains “the hooks that can grab the attention of otherwise disinterested passersby, and gives them an avenue into the work that can then lead to a greater connection.”
Geddes explains his process, through which a core idea is developed and revised over many studies:
There will be an initial kernel of an idea or a feeling, but moulding that into something that can withstand translation into a full work takes a lot of time and thought.
I like to progress through a series of studies, living with each one for a while as I try to understand what is and isn’t working. At some point the image feels right, which leads on to the next revision and study and so on. Then down the track, if it passes the test, I feel justified launching into a full painting.
To view more of Geddes’ work, visit www.jeremygeddesart.com.