“It’s horrendous, it’s constant failure”: Geoff McFetridge on the pain of painting

In Geoff McFetridge’s light-filled studio in the Atwater neighbourhood of Los Angeles, the artist and designer has a stack of sketchbooks that is, he estimates, “probably over five feet tall”. These date back to the beginning of his career some two and a half decades ago. “There is a sort of weird old-man filing system,” he jokes, shuffling through them. “In some ways, I have a terrible memory, but then I can remember something that happened in these books years later, and I can go back and look at it and see what it was really like.”

He picks a sketchbook up, seemingly at random, and leafs through it. Each page has been roughly divided up into a series of panels, and each panel contains its own sketch. Looking at them in sequence, it’s clear that each sketch shows a slight progression compared to its predecessor; sometimes just a tiny detail has changed, other times, it’s a more obvious conceptual shift. “One thing leading to the next to the next to the next,” Geoff says. “For me, it’s like getting outside of yourself. Or you could say it’s like an inner journey. How do you go deeper within yourself? It’s an incremental journey, from the first thing to the hundredth.”

What emerges from his “filing system” is a clear sense of the ideas and concerns that Geoff has been preoccupied with over the years. Sometimes, he says, when looking for inspiration during a project, he’ll return to an older sketchbook, open it up and be stunned: “It’ll be the exact same stuff. Like, I’ll have drawn the same thing for ten years.”

There certainly are recurring themes in his work. In fact, recurrence and repetition are themselves important (not just for his repetitious creative process). For his 2016 show, The Quiet Of Not Listening, at V1 in Copenhagen, he wrote about what it would be like to walk along a Möbius strip. “It would be an infinite wander,” he said. “The continuousness, ending up in the same place as where you started, is recurring in what I do.”

Yet this does a disservice to the sheer range of work that Geoff produces. His practice is difficult to categorise, bridging those often-artificial gaps between illustration, graphic design and art. His list of clients includes some of the biggest brands in the world, but the outputs are equally as diverse and impressive – he has made animations for Apple and The New York Times; designed shoes for Nike; painted a mural for Warby Parker; and illustrated covers for magazines. But then, almost half of his time is spent methodically applying acrylic paints to canvases.

What unites all his work is an understanding of the power of images – their ability to communicate complicated ideas in an instant, but also their capacity for confounding us and presenting us with a puzzle. As he said in this interview (carried out over a year ago, before the pandemic struck), his paintings aim for this ideal: “It’s such a long paragraph. But it’s just one image.”

INT: What was your time at CalArts like in the 90s?

GM: It was a totally utopian experience, truly life-changing for me. I had come from this world where everything that matters is what something looks like and at CalArts, they were just like, “No, all we care about is how you think, we don’t care what it looks like.” It was all concept. There was also a lot of process – it mattered how you got to the end. And I became interested in the question: What if you could see all of that thinking in the work, but at the same time, what if the work had all the stuff I loved from before I came to CalArts, like the vitality of stuff I would show to my friends?

INT: When you say a “Design Project” like that, what do you mean? Like an identity for a company? Is that something you wouldn’t take on?

GM: Well, the thing is, I would do that, but I would start the project by asking: Do you really need an identity? Wouldn’t the most interesting thing for a giant company be to baffle your consumer by your identity being ever-present, but ever-changing? I approach all projects like that. I want to meet you in your place, where it’s most like you and most like what you do, and I want you to talk about what your brand is, in your own words. That, to me, is the benefit of design: It lets you get underneath everything and explain it. But if the project is: Let’s get under everything and obfuscate, let’s hide that, put a mask on this thing – to sell it, to convince, to explain away aspects – then I don’t know how to do that. I love design, but I always think: Is that it?

INT: So, why not just stop at drawing? Why go further and convert these into paintings?

GM: I did that for a while, in the 90s. I would do the sketch and then I would scan it and blow it up, and be like, “Here’s your ten T-shirts” and they would all be just the sketch. But then you ask how you can raise your expectations for what you make. How can you travel through space? So, it starts with a drawing, but that’s just the launching-off point for other things.

INT: Because an abstract painting implies that you’re going to bring your own interpretation to it?

GM: Right. So, I’m saying, what’s the opposite? What if it’s super clear, signage-clear? Like in the airport, you know, and it’s explaining something to you. But instead of it being where to go to find the lounge, it’s something very poetic, but you’re still engaged in that way.

INT: It’s interesting that you bring in signage and wayfinding, because it feels exactly like what you were talking about earlier – how you’re “designing art”.

GM: As you participate in design as a designer, you start to see the evolution of things, you see, “OK that’s legible, that’s a thing, that starts to read. Oh whoa, that makes a letter ‘R’!” These are the experiences of being a designer, where you’re taking things that exist in the world, these signs and symbols and words and images, and you’re messing with them. And you go into this Tron-like world where you can change perception, manipulate understanding.

For me, it’s like, what if you could share that with everyday people, people who aren’t designers? It’s their language, it’s our shared language, because we get fed this design language whether we want it or not. We’re all literate. So my work uses that sort of lexicon or series of designy or graphic moves, but then it becomes really about what I use them for.