When Geoffrey Gersten was a youngster, he would shred through his mother’s magazines looking for images of cowboys and the West. When his mother discovered his pile of torn pages, she was horrified to see that most were cigarette ads. “She was not pleased that I was so interested in the Marlboro Man, but I couldn’t help that they were cigarette ads,” Gersten says. “That image of the West was so appealing to me.”
Yee-Haw Drive-In, oil on canvas, 48 x 72”
Today Gersten looks back on those images as important stepping stones to his own career as a painter of the West. “I’m not a cowboy and I don’t live on a ranch. But that image is the ideal, and it’s why the marketing for those companies worked so well. The image of a lone cowboy is a rugged image, a dangerous image. And yet, he was also a hero figure,” the artist says. “If you look at literature or even film, like the movie Shane, this dangerous hero was a common archetype. They made for great Western stories.”
Many of the Marlboro Man ads and the film Shane were shot near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is fitting since Gersten’s next show, Silver Screens & Cowboy Dreams,will take place in Jackson at Altamira Fine Art beginning September 5. His work, which is a playful variation of Pop Art, features imagery from the 1920s and 1930s that he conceptualizes with modern juxtapositions, including text painted directly on the canvas and neon dots painted in fields of white. This style is the old careening into the new, and it’s a fresh take on Western subject matter.
The End (Rough and Tumble), oil on canvas, 30 x 48”
His paintings showing “The End” painted across the canvas are especially enthralling. Some might suggest the artist is being presumptive in calling an end to something as vast as the American West, but there is a historic precedent for this idea. Consider John Ford, who literally slammed the door on the West in the final moments of The Searchers. Acknowledging the end, in whatever way a viewer might interpret it, is an open-ended and thought-provoking idea for these images.
After Daybreak, oil on canvas, 36 x 24”
“I don’t want my work to be kitsch, and yet the more accurate it gets the more kitsch it gets. I want it to be beautiful but also have a generic quality about these subjects,” Gersten says. “One of the reasons I go back to the early 20th century in photographs is because those people are posing less. They are photographed as they are not prepared for the photo. There is a real, genuine human quality to their looks and postures. It’s not artificial, and the silvery black-and-white image reminds me of the movies. These are romantic images, but they are also real.”
Gersten’s show will be on view through September 17. —
Powered by Froala Editor
