Description
Geri Gould received her first camera at age eight from her father, Joe DiCuffa. He was a professional portrait photographer in New York City and provided a solid foundation of training and inspiration.
Her photography has been exhibited and received recognition with Easton Arts Council, Citizens for Easton, Black Rock Art Guild at Burroughs Community Center, Harborview Market and Framemakers Gallery.
After Geri passed away in January 2023, fellow Easton artist Robert Brennan assisted Geri’s partner Kit Briner in curating Geri’s final series of 28 photographs for our exhibit at Greiser’s Coffee & Market.
This is how Brennan described the work in this series, Discovered Light:
Geri Gould was an artist who happened to use a camera. Like Claude Monet and so many other painters, Geri was on a continuous and relentless search for the light, and in the process, she discovered the shadows, thus starting a visual dialogue of elegance, intrigue, mystery, and poetry.
The light streams in through the window, is interrupted by the leg and side of the gate leg table. The shadow is cast on the wall as a silhouette. The artist chooses what to save and composes by distilling the visual elements of shape, line, texture, and value into powerful, simplified abstractions, not unlike Robert Motherwell’s paintings, inspired by the shadows cast by the “El” upon the Manhattan streets below.
Engaging in some kind of alchemy, Geri makes shapes dissolve into mystical visions, works of ambiguity, mystery, and beauty wherein the viewer is treated to a most sophisticated visual, mental, and emotional journey in which the artist simply but not simply, shows us what she found in the most common everyday occurrence of the sun shining through the window.
The interplay of the light and the dark has been the “stuff” of painters, poets, musicians, philosophers, and all variations of mankind since the first questions posed regarding the night and the day. As there can be no music without silence between the notes, there can be no elegant shadows unless the light is also present.
Geri Gould’s gift to us is in a plain, but not so plain symphony of shadow and light, composed over time in the finest tradition of art making, the passionate search to find beauty and meaning in the often missed light that may cast itself even across our bathroom wall.
