Day, Night.
Night.
Day.
one, Infinity.
In 1965 I thought
"paint sky on everything."
In 1989 is the consideration
To paint every sky?
The act of painting the sky
Every day, once, three times.
Eight times a day
As it shifts
And changes.
Or not to paint it
But just to look
Has become a preoccupation.
A curious, quiet ongoing activity.
— New York. May 1989
How do Geoffrey's clouds fit in with his other work? How does his obsession with clouds fit in with his other obsessions? His other obsessions that he articulates as rites. He sits naked on a concrete wharf at the edge of the Baltic Sea. He pounds rocks into colored powders. He smears the powders over his body. He ties himself up into a bundle of twigs and branches of flowering shrubs. He carries stones to the top of a mountain. All of this seems so much more visceral, so much more magical in intention that the work with clouds. But perhaps it's simply that making pictures of clouds is the only way he can fulfill a relationship with them. The only way he can fulfill a relationship with them. The sky, the clouds, the drawings and watercolors and paintings of sky and clouds, include an idea of physically unbridgeable distance. Geoff deals bodily with aspects of nature with which it's possible to deal bodily. He deals visually with an aspect of nature that can only be dealt with visually.
Geoffrey once made a piece from one hundred stones — "more than one hundred stones collected for George Maciunas" and incorporated it into a work called "A Sheep's Skeleton and Rocks." He also once wrote a letter to George Brecht: "Dear George, The sky is reflected in the water."
— Henry Martin