Geiser works to capture essence

Being a full-time artist has not been easy lately, thanks to the economy. David Geiser has been working at it for 40 years, and had been successful with private collectors and corporations. Then his field became another victim of the same forces that put thousands of Americans out of work.

“My business went right down the toilet for a while, like everybody else,” said Mr. Geiser, who lives with his wife, the actress Mercedes Ruehl, in Springs. “Sales had been down, it was really quiet. Just when you thought you’d reached the bottom rung of the ladder, you saw there were more ladders down there during the last three years. But I am starting to see glimmers of the art world turning around. No matter what, though, I still roll out into the studio every morning to go to work.”

That’s a good thing, because there are still galleries seeking to show his work. The latest is the Nabi Gallery, with an exhibit titled “Nocturnes,” which is on view through March 20. Though the show is not being held on the East End—the Nabi Gallery is on West 25th Street in Manhattan—it has the same

kind of East End flavor as when there was a Nabi Gallery on eastern Long Island. In addition to Mr. Geiser, the exhibit features the work of Simon Gaon of Shelter Island and the late Giglio Dante, who lived for many years in East Hampton.

Though Mr. Geiser’s resume includes exhibiting his Abstract Expressionist paintings in dozens of galleries, this is his first appearance at the Nabi Gallery, which was founded in Sag Harbor in 1996 by Val and Min-Myn Schaffner, who have a house in Springs.

“We met through mutual friends at a luncheon at Edward Albee’s house in Montauk,” explained Mr. Geiser. “The Nabi Gallery had shown friends of mine there, and it finally trickled down to me.”

He is being modest about a rather eclectic career. Mr. Geiser graduated from the University of Vermont and was poised to go to graduate school at Yale University. But it was 1969, and the summer before he was to go to New Haven he traveled to San Francisco because of all the counter-culture headlines the city was generating. He never made it to Yale.

“I already loved comics and had my head in a book all the time as a kid,” he recalled. “I learned more about Nordic mythology from reading the Marvel comic Thor than I ever did at school. When I landed in the Mission District, around the corner from me was Gary Arlington’s comic book company, where R. Crumb and everybody in the underground movement were being published. I began drawing comics too and became fascinated with the form—it was immediate, contemporary, and you could express ideas, there was nothing stuffy about it. I decided there was so much more to learn”

For eight years Mr. Geiser was in the forefront of the underground comics movement, having his work published in book form as well as in Ramparts and other provocative publications. When he went to Europe to study painting in Paris, he was able to get work at magazines there because the publishers already knew his comics work in the underground realm.

“I got to hang around and be an ex-pat for a while,” he said. “I still love comics, but the time came when I knew I wasn’t going to keep doing them for a living. Still, I wish I had kept more of my work, because I see some of my old comic books showing up on eBay as collector’s items.”

Back in the U.S., he rededicated himself to painting and his work was shown regularly in New York and at galleries elsewhere in the country. “We came out for summers and knew a lot of artists out here,” Mr. Geiser said of his early experience on the East End with Ms. Ruehl, who has performed in plays in New York and at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor and Guild Hall in East Hampton.

“I had a huge studio in Soho, but that sort of got dot-commed out of existence. After 20 years, I couldn’t afford the rent. We decided to move out here full-time. Also, my wife’s mother had just died and her father needed taking care of out here, so it seemed like the time was right to make Springs our home.”

Another artist in the Nabi Gallery show, Giglio Dante, made East Hampton his home in 1981. He had been born in Rome, and his family immigrated to Boston when he was a teenager. His first one-man show was in 1944. A prolific artist into his 90s, he died in 2006.

The Nabi Gallery first showed Mr. Dante’s work when it was still in Sag Harbor. He was included in a group show at the Manhattan location—the first time his work was seen in New York City since the ’60s—but, sadly, his wife died the morning of the opening and he did not get to see his last significant exhibit.

Mr. Geiser regularly conducts workshops at the Ross School and Guild Hall and enjoys working with children. “Many kids are already there artistically, with a purity of vision without the corruption of aesthetics of how things should be,” he said. “Until they learn to draw, they are wonderful, then they try to do things the right way and everyone wants them to and they begin to think they should do things the right way. But whatever they are doing, it’s fun being with the kids. And I get to steal some of their ideas.”

It has also been helpful to him as an artist to be married to another creative person. “We feed off each other,” he 
said about Ms. Ruehl. “We can fill each other’s larder sometimes with a 
different perspective. We can give each other an insider’s look, yet we’re not 
in competition. We’re both creative people but, thankfully, in different endeavors.”