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I think it started as like a kid.

Being at home really wanting to build a model.

And it's like, "Yeah, because you're a kid,

you like building models." But it was like, "No, no."

I need a way out of life today.

Having that control...

it gives you a taste of something.

Recognized for deftly relating design

to Time-based considerations

and welcoming graphically charged

outsider street subculture into mainstream conversation.

His work has been mounted on institutions and galleries

and includes paintings, installations, furniture.

Who's Geoff McFetridge to somebody that didn't know?

He is a man of many talents.

Foremost, he's an artist.

You'll see a Pepsi billboard,

a Apple Watch face.

But you don't know his name necessarily.

He's like a hero

or like a Zen master within the creative industry.

If I want to communicate something in a new, fresh way,

I think of Geoff.

It's almost like he's an inventor of how to communicate.

Everyone's kind of, like, desperately trying to be Geoff.

But no one's quite hitting the mark.

He's just done everything his own way.

He hasn't listened to anyone or anything

except what feels right and true to him.

I was interested in geometry ever since I was a little kid.

Geometry was almost like a, like a tic.

I would lay in bed and look at shadows for, like, hours.

I would see connections between lines in the room

and have to like step over them.

Everything is thought through with drawing.

I draw with a pencil because a pencil moves at a certain rate.

I do a lot of drawings that are this big

because basically that's about as fast as I think.

I continuously draw and draw.

Once there's enough out of the way that's expected,

you'll start to get to a place where it's like that thinking led to this new place.

But it's like small steps. You don't just go like unknown.

You travel downward.

I call it the White Well, 'cause it's like, unlike a well,

it gets lighter the deeper you go.

We're even aware of our growing up.

It was a mystery. I remember looking at a painting,

someone sitting in like a French café.

I remember this feeling of like,

I'm never going to be able to make this.

How am I going to go to, like, a café in Paris?

Like, I don't know.

I felt like I should make logos

and do design because that's my world.

I am from the suburbs and I have friends in bands.

We put a dent in your car as quiet as a mouse.

Did you notice graffiti the same color as your house?

Oh, come on. That's so rod.

We went out all night to see if anything was there,

but the streets were just scribbles drawn in thin air.

We did all sorts of stuff because no one was around.

Might as well scream if you want to hear sound.

It is a little bit extreme to grow up in Canada.

One of the advantages of being parents

at such an early age is that we were very idealistic.

Were you guys hippies?

- Kind of. Yeah. - Wait till you see our pictures.

My mom was a teacher. My dad was a lawyer.

Everyone's houses looked the same.

It was like, very understandable.

There's the things you control,

and then there's things you don't control.

You're born into a family, you're born into a racial identity.

You're born in a place.

I didn't know I was half-Chinese.

I was just like my mom's white mom.

I went to a big high school that was almost entirely white.

Both sides of my family were super westernized.

It was all about like,

how can you assimilate as fast as possible?

I never found my Chinese roots.

It was like, I'll just be part of a new culture.

Skateboarders were brown. Skateboarders were Chinese.

They were Hawaiian. They were black. I did gravitate to places

that were super accepting.

What a glorious day for skating.

In my teens into my twenties,

I was really angsty and deeply unsatisfied

with everything I was doing.

Yeah, I was like a wreck for years.

Really struggling through finding my personal identity,

finding a place to belong.

And is that from life being an outsider?

So you just are like, I'm outsider for life.

In grade one, he's got these little doodles all over the place.

They're no different

from all these other little boys who love to draw.

It's a mystery to me when it started evolving.

I think it was very gradual.

He literally drew three hours an evening.

In high school, I made, like, a poster

where I would just put this drum kit on a piece of paper.

That was like the light bulb going off.

I was just putting something together.

Someone said, that's graphic design.

My dad never worked like a five-day-a-week,

like he worked like a six-day-a-week my entire life.

And then on Sunday, he would be building something in our house.

I remember digging a hole for my dad in the yard.

I dig and hit rocks, then have to tunnel around.

I cringe to think of that clink, clink sound

all the way to China was what I thought.

All the way to China was when I would stop.

I imagined a sliver of light as I broke through the ground

all the way to China without going around all the way to China.

And the going was rough.

Then my dad came outside and said,

"That's deep enough."

True story.

Growing up in the world that I was in

drugs and drinking, and that was like the heart of it.

The worst part of not drinking

is when it makes other people uncomfortable.

Clear-headedness has always been my sort of goal.

Um, so I've never, yeah, I've never really have, never...

really been that guy.

In the art world

with a lot of cigarettes and alcohol and joints...

it hasn't been normal to take care of yourself.

Social Distortion were wasted.

Minor Threat had ideology.

I could way more relate to Minor Threat.

What was sort of admirable was very different.

Nothing was worse than Jim Morrison.

Nothing was worse than Led Zeppelin,

like drummers who twirl their sticks.

Even the notion of being like a heroic artist

drinking and painting and womanizing or something,

or whatever, you know, the equivalent is for a woman.

That was sort of corny.

Growing up in Calgary, it was fairly isolated.

What you're making is existing in this void.

There was a local art college

that had a commercial art program.

I wanted to pursue design.

I was just sort of like a goofball...

making this very poppy image-based stuff.

A friend of mine became a pro snowboarder.

He asked me, "Oh, will you do my graphic?"

That was like working in snowboarding

and starting to make skateboards.

I came down to California to meet the guy I was doing snowboards with.

And I remember coming to the door of his house in L.A. he laughed.

He was like, I thought you were a man

because I was like 21 years old or something.

Okay, If I'm doing this now,

what am I going to do in 20 years?

Being drawn to Cal Arts was about like

this is like a world of making thing that was unknown to me.

I was in grad school with people who had had careers

and they were coming to Cal Arts to sort of get the new language.

I was outgunned and overthought.

So I sort of disassembled myself.

I stopped doing everything that I was good at.

I stopped drawing and I made work that was focusing on like,

how am I thinking?

The computer arrived.

I was just, like...

making the ugliest I've, you've ever seen for two years.

Just like failing, failing, failing.

The legible design was a product of great thinking.

What can I do to make this type of thinking clear?

Instead of having like, 10-20 layers,

can I just present this, like, singular thing?

I had the most to say in the simplest work.

That's the essential turning point.

The minute I graduated I got flown to Microsoft.

Where does that leave? To a better job at Microsoft.

Like it doesn't go anywhere.

That conventional life. It wouldn't have worked.

Took a job just to save enough money to buy a computer.

Okay. Now I'm going to, like, pursue these things I wanted.

I did a series of skateboards for a girl.

I was supposed to go work at Girl and Chocolate Skateboards,

and then it fell through.

Then I'm just like, "Oh, I have no job now."

Drawing to me is like an incredible thing.

The world is fluid in it.

So, for me, it's like,

"Oh, great, like, I'll use this language."

I'll surprise myself by making 100 things

and one of them is like a keeper.

It's like looking for rare mushrooms in the forest.

In skiing I'll be at the top of like a really difficult run

and I won't know where I'm going to turn.

There's too much data and drawing sort of like that.

Like it's like super infinite.

If you tell yourself, I'm going to just fill this page with drawings of the same car,

and the second time you draw it a little bit different.

At some point the hand starts doing the thinking

and there is a moment as you're drawing the car over and over again.

You sense it?

And that is then it's like sort of like, this, like door opens and you go through that.

You go like, the car just became a horse.

After the job at Girl Skateboards fell apart

and it's like, oh, shit, what do I do?

Yeah, I don't know.

There was a lot sort of happening at that moment in L.A.

Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys.

I was on the edge of it,

figuring out what I needed to do.

You know, we're all, our mid-twenties and making stuff

and helping each other make stuff.

Trying to navigate which way to go and what to do.

Everyone was just making stuff

because they wanted to make it for themselves

and for each other.

And it wasn't about like branding or really making money.

Glitter Rock was right before being overproduced stuff.

We were so into being indie.

It's like, yeah, let's start a magazine,

start a skate company, start a label.

The worst thing anyone could be was like a corporate sell-out.

There was a time

when you could be defined by like what you made.

Andy Jenkins is this pivotal character

that I knew from the world of skateboarding,

and he introduced me to the Lewman.

Mark Lewman is awesome.

So Lewman became the editor of Grand Royal magazine,

and it was the Beastie Boys magazine.

He called and he says, We need an art director. So I was like, "Sure."

He met good people, cool people,

which wouldn't have happened

if he'd gone working for a big agency.

To get to where the Beastie Boys it was like the best magazine in the world,

best band in the world

that actually like seemed like the coolest guys ever.

It was crazy.

I saw the energy of, like, backstage passes,

the afterparty, this whole thing,

and I immediately was like,

I'll not to be in the Beastie Boys office. I got to leave.

So I had a cordless phone that like worked across the street.

To maintain my own autonomy was like super important.

I was making like $12,000 a year.

My girlfriend at the time is now my wife.

She worked in a cafe and I had to borrow money from her.

But living in a one-car garage that I like built a bed in

and just like super-basic life.

I'd be covered in like eczema, rashes,

then realizing like, oh, these things are caused by stress.

I was like, I'm bad at art directing a magazine.

It looks terrible.

Yeah, I was like a wreck. But I had Sarah.

How did you guys meet?

A mutual friend.

She just introduced us.

She was in the backseat, and I got into the car and I was like,

"Hey, who's that?"

He had really curly hair, like big curly hair.

He was wearing a sweater vest.

So I thought it was really strange.

I don't think it was love at first sight.

What's your favorite thing about Sarah?

- Sense of humor? - No. Not my looks.

At that age, you're making a lot of mistakes.

I was, like, burying myself in work.

I just remember not sleeping.

It's super-challenging. You're really not in control.

He felt like it was really important to have a job.

I was always like, "You should do art."

Right then. This way.

Art is so much more important.

I did have a sort of vision

that none of the Grand Royal stuff fit with it.

How can I find an avenue

for this type of work that I had a vision for?

Starting my own studio it wasn't a business.

I had a computer on a board and I was like, "That was it."

I was experimenting,

working in new mediums and working with different people,

trying to find places where I can exist.

It was difficult starting out.

Just being like a designer who delivers product for a client.

You produce 30 things.

Someone else decides for you that that's the one you keep.

It felt very unrewarding.

Even if I'm really successful at this, I'm not going to be happy.

I had this type of work that I felt was my best work.

But no one knew to ask for it.

The only way to have people see

was I had to, like, slip that work into presentation.

I remember working for like a video festival

and I did an experiment of like,

here's these things that sort of address the themes of the festival.

And then I did one that was just like a tin can.

And then it just had worms on it.

She was like, "Oh, that one."

So then I started presenting stuff that was like that for everything.

Having control it came to define

what type of work I was going to create.

Trying to find avenues for that. It wasn't easy.

The downfall of design is you're anonymous.

If you make a T-shirt for the band,

you don't have to be up there, but you can participate.

You do the graphic of the skateboard,

but you never have to worry about making the trick or putting your name on it

to bring yourself forward and be visible in the work.

It felt like taking a risk.

There was a lot of like, rejected work.

Instead of it being like, throw it all out.

What more could these drawings be?

I was doing stuff for extra-large.

They start a gallery called Georges.

I was seeing stuff in my sketchbooks I wanted to make

and then showing that to them

and they were just like, why not have a show?

My first shows were just all screen prints.

It was the beginning.

To be able to show something

to your friends that has like a personal truth within it,

even to have one friend to say, "That's funny."

That's really a lot of positive reinforcement.

The early artmaking was about like,

"I'm going to fill the room with me, stuff, like, my mind."

Then the room gets bigger and you fill more. You do more.

Running on ambition.

Slowly showing it more galleries.

The biggest thing in my life was making art.

How do you like the park?

When Frances was first born, it was really hard for us.

It's a full, crazy change.

And then it's like Beautiful Losers is happening in Cincinnati.

And then he left.

And I'd have to make an installation on the spot.

I'm trying to mold those, like, thumbtacks out of, like, clay,

and I'm totally disoriented.

She was, like, super-freaked out and, like, upset.

And I was like, having a nervous breakdown.

There was this tension between my expectations of myself...

trying to balance it out. It gets strange.

Someone asked me one time, like,

"What's the most precious thing you own?"

And I was like, "Oh, my memories."

But I don't know how long they're going to last

so I feel like these kind of are the permanent memories that won't go anywhere.

The Australian magazine Oyster took a big, glossy fashion magazine,

asked me to go to his studio in Atwater Village

to spend a day with him photographing him.

What year was that?

This was 2006.

He was doing these paper-weaving pieces, screen prints, textiles.

You could just see, like, this guy's going somewhere.

Shortly after that he asked me

to come to Eindhoven, Netherlands, with him.

He had a solo show at the MU Museum.

I knew, like, I'm the type of artist

who's changing and growing very publicly.

Well, this would be good to have, you know, Andrew document.

His photographs are really special.

What had really inspired me as a young teenager

a girlfriend gave me this book by David Duncan, who, arguably,

shot the best photographs of Picasso.

They felt warm. They felt like they let this person in.

The pictures revealed like a whole different side of Picasso's life

that I would have never known his children, his studio, his home.

All that stuff was fascinating to me.

And it's really how I approached

but I didn't know enough of Geoff.

When I asked him to start taking photos.

There was stuff happening in the making of the things

that was more interesting than the things themselves.

To have moments shot on film by a great photographer,

it's like gold.

Do you think your project with him will ever end?

I don't know.

Being part of art history feels like a long shot.

So I feel responsible for sort of like writing my own history.

I don't like that idea of just being forgotten.

Geoff always wanted to have a responsible setup.

Being a commercial director in L.A., that's a great life.

Like you have insurance, you have, you have stability.

How long were you working as a director?

A few years.

It was in the rotation, for sure.

Oh, good. Yeah. Just dance. No smoking.

You look cool.

It was very easy for me to write concepts

that would translate to film.

And then I was like, I wish someone else could direct this.

Being a commercial director is very difficult

because you are a very small percentage of what is happening.

Too many people to pleased.

And I don't think he felt like he was good at it.

It was a conscious decision to give something up.

The reality of being a director is like

having a passion for film like I have for drawing.

I was sort of re-defining how I worked,

what my work could be and where it would go.

I was evolving, doing projects for like music clients,

MTV and different companies.

I was in that water on the east side of L.A.,

surrounded by people doing interesting stuff.

I would struggle. Like early on I would do a sketch.

The goal is really to make the thing that's finished

as good as the sketch, and often the sketch was better.

T-shirt designs were something.

It was the first time I did it for a company called Milk Fed,

which was Sofia Coppola's company.

And that's when I first experimented at the sketch for the thing was the thing.

So it would be a little tiny drawing. And, I mean, that's the thing.

We just were having fun.

There was like a whole kind of rock scribble.

It was all very, like, homemade.

I asked him to do the titles for Virgin Suicides

when I was working on my first film.

Geoff's drawings have something different

than something that a team of creative professionals do.

It's not about being perfect.

To take a risk of making art

and applying it to projects was really working.

Andy Jenkins, Spike Jonze and Mark Leweman.

They all worked together and they did skateboarding stuff.

We were sort of moving in similar circles.

Spike was like the super effective guru,

like guy that I could look up to,

making stuff that felt artful within these constrained worlds.

It's sort of like navigating systems.

For him the system was Hollywood,

which was like the gnarliest. It's like inspiring.

I was sort of establishing myself.

I could ask him for advice,

and then he offered legitimate opportunities.

At that time my wife, like, she'd work on a Saturday.

I'd sort of work all weekend

or we'd work late and, like, no schedule.

And then suddenly it's, like, "This isn't going to work."

You don't want to, like,

get less and less control of your time.

We want things to get better.

Hello.

At that time, I'd have like a crew of people

helping with fabrication.

And I would have a drive to the screen-printing place,

burn the screens, bring them back to my studio, print it,

like screw a bunch of them up.

Okay. If I take all that energy of, like

driving around and making tons of stuff,

but I put it into a painting, right?

Like, what does that mean?

Oh!

But you don't go and just do the stuff you can do.

You go and do the stuff you can't do.

So you fail to the point like, that's how you learn something.

It's mostly slamming.

Whoa!

In the beginning, you said when you first started painting

there was like a three-month process.

- Six months. - Six months.

I had a painting hanging here for six months.

I didn't know what type of paint to use.

I didn't know how to prepare the canvas.

I would paint the whole thing and get to the point where it was like not working

and I'd sand the whole painting down.

I would scrape it all off.

I'm physically rocked,

frustrated and screwing up.

I've bought a giant compressor. All these materials.

Right when I finished it's like a terrifying like,

"Is this good or bad?"

And then I came in a day later.

My wife had put a post-it on it

and it was just like, "This is awesome."

That sort of set in motion.

Oh, I'm going to follow this thread.

I need to be outside all morning.

This room is like sun lamps from all sides.

I'm focused on making work that, like, is satisfying for myself.

Well, so what? What are you pushing away?

Geoff talks about this solitary arts.

I mean, I don't really know anything about Zen,

but it's a Zen virtue.

A mindful skillset.

You have to be able to have this focused dialogue with yourself

where you're making a bunch of decisions in the moment.

It's constant practice.

You're not like, I'm only a monk between nine and five.

When you leave the temple,

you're still mindful. It's who you are.

I got interested in trail running,

and the logical end is running ultramarathons.

I'm scheduled to run a 50-miler.

It's a long, long process of extending miles,

teaching your body

there's no shortcuts. You can't, like, fast forward.

When I show up for any race and the minute starts,

I'm just like, I'm fucking passing everybody.

I'm passing all these people,

and I'm going to run myself into the ground.

There'll be one last person that I'll be trying to pass till the very end.

I am bummed when I finish a race

and I'm not completely destroyed.

It's taking things to a level like, no one would do this.

No one would take this this far.

Working in design,

what's hard is like, setting your own standard for what you expect of yourself.

I like to test myself.

Like I have an hour to make this what I want it to be.

I am doing revisions. No one's asking me to do it.

Feels like a similar thing of endurance.

What if I go at this heightened level an uncomfortable pace?

What happens?

Do you ever just, like, chill?

Nope.

The guy is non-stop.

He knows how to push himself in all these different areas.

Discipline is great for getting the work done.

It can also be a constraint,

almost as a Protestant cycle where you keep on

like whipping yourself. I must run further, I must do better.

Let's just say like, let's just make a general blanket statement

that anyone in these fields is pretty obsessive, you know?

When, it's like, how do you manage your obsessiveness?

I've had moments where I think

Geoff is a control freak for sure, you know.

Geoff is an anal control freak

that has a very specific color code that he'll wear.

Process or routine, it's a response to something.

To decide to make work

that's inward looking was about like,

I need to confront being human.

When you're just feeling down or lost,

how do you work through inner stuff?

The farther you go, the deeper it gets.

And you walk till just your nose is out.

You're on like the tips of your toes.

You could swim into the expanse or you could take a step back.

And there's that moment in between those two states.

What I'm doing, because I'm trying to go to that point.

I don't know that every artist has to be tortured, but I think it can help.

There's definitely a lot going on in his head, for sure.

You know, I have a friend who has so much energy in her that she has to run.

It has to come out some way. And Geoff is a similar way that if he didn't let it out,

he would be a kind of tortured soul.

Maybe making such neat, precise work

is suggesting that he's started with chaos

and has managed to... clean it his way of making the world right.

In my work, there is a humanity that I understand is a sadness.

It's talking about like a darkened quarter.

I had my first painting show in New York.

Hanging paint on canvas in Manhattan,

like, that's when you think like, "Oh, well, this is like this new level."

Around the same time our younger daughter Phoebe was born.

Having kids is a lot of pressure.

Making these decisions that have consequence to other people.

I'm just looking at the data and I'm like, reset, reset, change...

like turning stuff off, voiding this.

When you're with your family, it is like a version of being more yourself.

Constantly thinking of, "How do I find more of that in my life?"

But there's always obstacles that make it seem impossible.

It's a super long game.

We've been together since I started making stuff.

With Sarah I don't talk about

what goes on in the studio day to day

because I save it for like crucial moments of like, okay,

"Can I talk to you about this?"

Because I'll be confused or like, need advice?

I'm so deep in my world

that she has some perspective that I don't have.

I operate purely emotionally. I will go dark.

I think when we first met, I tried to meld him into my world.

Like, you should smoke. You should suffer.

Art is vulnerability. Art is putting yourself out there.

She wants there to be like emotional content.

She's completely disinterested in form.

Like, definitely. I'm like, the form is the key.

She's the opposite.

It's like, it's not worth doing anything unless there's...

I don't even know where to describe it.

It's like emotional and it's like, intangible.

It's like this fog.

She taught me how to open up into new territories.

To express yourself and be vulnerable

that was a big jump for him.

I paint, so few paintings 'cause I can tell

this I can make a painting that's going to be better than the drawing.

And I'm not going to paint that

because the drawing is going to be better than the painting.

They're constantly failing.

One color just throws it off.

The only way to make them as good as the drawing

is for the colors to make the likeness of them disappear.

You can't just, like, fill it in.

It's like an intangible thing.

The colors themselves are not what they seem.

A painting that seems to be bright colors,

the actual colors, they're like very complicated, muddy colors.

When I'm like put a little bit too much blue in it

and I see how it sucks

everybody knows, the UPS guy knows

and my mom knows and my wife knows

and my kids know. I mean, my kids totally know.

They'll be like, "That one's not that good."

Yeah!

Hey.

I think when you have kids,

the most you can teach them is just by showing.

They were in a Montessori school.

The director of the school decided that

she was going to have a theater program and that it was serious.

So I was like, "Oh, I'm going to make a poster for each play

that's up to the level of like how the school views the plays."

So "How the Camel Got his Hump."

Which I remember, Frances was the camel.

Which? "Selfish Giant."

There would be times when I'd be like doing this

and spending effort on this and I'd be like,

I spend more effort on the, you know...

the school poster than some project, you know, but...

When you read artists' biographies,

then they get divorced

it's like a single line in a 300-page book.

None of this is possible without my wife,

my family, my marriage.

It's like an essential part of my whole everything.

Time. Its value is so ethereal,

it cannot be compared to any other thing.

I systemize to try to take control over.

The stuff that's important is all the small stuff.

What's up?

We have a serious artist.

Super-serious artist.

Well...

That was a good one, actually.

You're matching.

We dust her.

You hungry? We'll get food.

Hold on. You'll get a hamburger.

My wife says you're never more unhappy

than when you're just working on painting,

where I'm like, deciding colors.

And I'm like, "Oh," and I'm challenging it.

And it's like, "What am I doing all day?"

Going into my studio and painting. Sounds nice.

It's like, how lucky.

I don't want it to be like,

I use inks to make better paintings.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to like,

release that angst

and I'm going to use like a color I just had.

Like I'm like, "Ah."

Let's use that because I have it. The work became clearer,

and so much of it came from hearing that from my wife.

I love when all the work is in the studio,

when I do all the paintings and they're all together.

That feels great.

But this showing, it's nerve-racking

and, yeah, it doesn't feel good.

It's way easier to be just visual.

Like, I just make this stuff. I said it with the painting.

To have a show is to agree like,

no, I'm going to be there too, you know,

like, so it's like to be in the room is like,

to be like, "Well, I'm an actual person, not a visual person."

What are you thinking of when you're posing these?

Do you go to the Poop Restaurant?

- Café. I didn't think of it. - No, we've just heard about it.

That was one of the reasons I actually were staying over them.

I was like, oh, Poop Café. Yes. Yes. - You’re welcome.

It’s something I always love working with him,

just going over to his studio, and it ends up being 4 hours

of just talking, hanging out, drawing.

Can you give a high level of this stuff

that you've done with Geoff? I know it's like 20 years of work.

I had, everything, I think. I think everything on.

I worked on his film Being John Malkovich ,

so I did like the logo for like the production,

the logo for adaptation.

He did Where the Wild Things Are.

I did the titles and the poster and like all the marketing materials

and got really involved in it.

We had fought with the studio a lot on the movie.

They did not like the movie. We just sat there and just like

took out our angst on their logos.

When they saw it, they kind of got it.

They're like, "Okay."

Definitely. Spike is like, he's super demanding

and he keeps making the projects harder.

Her was the first time I really had worked.

that was like in the movie besides like the title sequence.

It was a love story of a man

falling in love with his inner face.

So it was like designing what this user interface was.

If I had to invent this plausible world that was like a character in the film.

He just hones in on what the feeling is supposed to be.

That's why the conversations is always so good, because he asks the questions

that make you articulate what it is it's supposed to be.

The only description Spike gave is like, The future's nice.

It's nice.

Which is great because, like, you couldn't look back on

a screen world in a futuristic movie

That was nice. It was always dystopic.

It was always like, like...

Like, a lot of numbers and lines and all this stuff.

If anyone else asked me to do it,

I would never have taken on the project.

I'm not going to be able to do it like it'll fail.

But I knew that we could improvise our way there,

creating this sort of back-story,

how AI would have evolved over time,

how screens would project themselves into the future.

I've had an iPhone in my pocket

for like the majority of my adult life,

having any kind of visual vocabulary or language

to be able to communicate on that battlefield is important.

There's something like built in to the way that he uses graphics

that is particularly legible

in this time and in this part of history.

It's not an accident

that the largest corporations in the world want to pick his brain

about how to communicate with visual language.

The practice. It relies on concepts that reoccur.

One would be human connection, human intimacy,

humans interacting. Humans like...

Like that, you know?

The world is made of inconsequential moments

and Geoff is taking out from the trillions

than going like, just look at this for a minute.

One image that communicates maybe weeks or months of thinking,

using the most minimal amount of line and shape.

I think it's so much harder than, than people think.

Somebody that's trafficking in that kind of iconography.

We imagine them not to be tackling big issues,

commentary about mortality or existence or community.

In that way,

Geoff's kind of hiding the medicine and the peanut butter.

The really dark time is like when there's nothing to work on.

There's nothing to keep your hands busy.

There's a kind of heaviness...

...that emptiness...

...when you're just yourself and you're just there.

You don't want to create an environment

where darkness thrives.

So what you do is you have a process

that you can take a step away from it.

What's the easiest way?

It's a pencil and a piece of paper.

I need outside stimulus. And part of that is like

working with different people, working in different ways.

A lot of companies I worked for are cultural brands.

People can be a bit snooty about working as a designer when they also make art.

You're either one thing or the other.

There's not many people who do both.

To straddle that world of design and painting

will be interesting long term

because the art world in some ways

might be the most biased

or have the most gatekeepers than any creative field.

Do you feel like outside of the art world,

even though, you are inside it?

Well, I'm not. I mean, I'm not like a blue-chip artist.

Some people come fresh out of Yale grad school

and they're the toast of the town.

Sometimes it's more interesting

if you kind of bubble up over 20 years

and are everybody's favorite underground band.

What's guiding him is like being true to himself,

developing the word, no matter where it ends up.

There's no like musician-type term for, like visual makers.

We've sort of decided

that artist isn't the same as musician.

If you say musician,

it can be like drone or it can be like birthday parties.

I want to do drone music and birthday parties.

I do watercolors when I travel

because I know, like this is the closest thing

to a memory as I can make.

And I just sit.

And I sort of just swivel my head and then I start painting something.

There's something that these will lead to.

Like, I'm not done developing my painting.

Look at this guy.

How can you say no?

87% like, "Yeah, definitely a lot."

Does that stress you out to say no?

No. It's super easy to say no.

I find it really easy to say no.

It's way more stressful to say yes

because there's only me. There's only so much I can do.

The most critical part of what I do

is deciding what projects to take or not take.

We'll be like calling him,

trying to get him to do something

and we won't hear from him for weeks.

And I'm like, "What do you mean? We got to do this right now?"

No one does that. Everyone's just grabbing what they can get

and they're taking money for it and they're selling out here and there,

and they're losing their integrity.

Like I don't have meetings with people

because I hate meetings and it's not a problem.

Like no one likes meetings. And so I never had to have meetings

and I don't work in a way that I need to have meetings.

How do you go, like I have meetings all the time.

- I don't know. - How are you? Are you like if someone's like,

- "Can you come here and meet?" - No. I do not. Like I say, like I don't like meetings,

but I don't ever have to tell people like, I don't like meetings.

So let's not meet, like, no one wants to meet with me.

People know, though, like I've talked to,

I've interviewed people and they're like, I heard he doesn't do meetings.

Oh, maybe that's what happened.

Yeah, I don't do meetings. Really.

He's like choosing exactly what he wants to do.

Many of us kind of look at him and think like,

how do I do that?

When you come into L.A. and you see people wearing masks

everywhere is covered in like a layer of anxiety.

When your whole thing is sort of like,

trying to be aware or conscious of the present.

When the present is projecting something powerfully anxious or intense,

you are you're very much like, in it, you know.

In my neighborhood,

the sidewalks are filled with people I've never seen before,

masked and staying six feet apart.

These are not regular runners or dog walkers.

These are couples and families out for a walk together.

One of the appeals of living in Los Angeles is the suburban,

normalness of my everyday life.

Weeks into the current situation,

waves of weirdness continue to erode

the familiar rhythms of my world.

Much of my day has remained the same,

but enough has changed to make time feel disassembled.

The days and nights feel like a strange version of normal.

When this is over, I don't want the traffic to come back.

I want all of this extra time with my family.

I want to hold on to this quietness

to see the people walking in our streets

and not feel their presence

is somehow related to the worlds falling apart.

This is capturing the moment.

Like when we sat down with our daughters and we talked about.

Like we had heard that one of their...

Sorry. One of their teachers had passed away from COVID.

And, you know, it's like we found out via email

and it was somebody that was really special to our family.

And she had helped my older daughter

with, like, like almost like tutoring her with, like, math difficulty.

And my younger daughter, she was like this sort of like class.

A class, sort of, like sort of a similar person, like a counselor almost.

This beautiful woman. And so this was like... um,...

It's us. Like I never do this really.

Like it's like our family.

And it's like talking with them about it.

And, you know, they were really, they took it really well, um,

uh, but it was that moment.

Um, and so in that moment, I felt like our house,

like it felt like a bunker,

you know, like so I made us like a bunker.

So this is like a chamber holding toilet paper.

This is like some sort of air filtration system.

And there's like a ladder to go through this portal

and this is the world above that looks normal,

but it's not, you know, it's not normal.

I mean, I look at this and it makes me cry.

It's like, uh, capturing something, like, really

obviously, it's like super personal.

You know this show for V1?

I never thought I was going to do this show.

I wasn't talking to the gallery 'cause I was going to be like,

I didn't do it, which is not my style at all.

I was not confident

that I was going to be able to make work.

I didn't want to, I was very, like, hesitant.

But like Jesse made the model and printed out four walls.

I said, like, here's the drawings.

Maybe there's something here.

We filled the room with what we thought would be most useful

the substance of living.

It took the shape of the walls.

And went to the height of the ceiling.

Like a train that has grown to the length of its tracks.

These days are nameless.

We have no words to describe the state of things.

And yet this is the title, the name.

Full of images that exist outside of language.

They'd give a name to the time.

Geoff comes from an era of artists

that looked at artwork different

than just strictly a canvas and a gallery.

This thing is like super involved

and technical.

And it happened in like no time.

I don't think anything compares to this.

This is like the guerilla art project.

I submitted a whole bunch of ideas

that ranged from just like images.

Then this is like the craziest, like, magic water mousetrap.

My goal is like, "Yeah, my daughters can take their kids to come see it."

It was meant to be forever.

Please welcome to the stage, Geoffrey.

It's a huge honor to be here.

Designers can really define what the future looks like,

and we have to imagine how it will be nice.

Everything about being a designer in our time is unique.

We're designing for an audience that's the most literate visual audience

that I think there ever has been

that doesn't have the words to describe itself.

These gaps, many gaps in our language, are an opportunity.

As designers, we can fill those gaps 1,000 times.

So thank you.

Sometimes looking at Geoff's work

and speaking to makes me feel bad

because I haven't yet worked out how to spend my time wisely.

I think everyone's trying to be able to just kind of

live in the way that we all desire.

Geoff's cracked the code and...

Well, all us peasants are like, "Give me the code."

Geoff realizes that there is a relationship

between art and commerce

in a way that seems very authentic and personal.

I would say it kind of comes

from a nineties thing of not selling out.

We never imagined that he would have the life that he has.

He knew what he wanted to do. Geoff knew.

Is Geoff satisfied?

Probably not.

For anybody who is prolific or worked so hard,

being satisfied would be terrible,

but I think he feels super fortunate.

He will have a career as big as he's comfortable with

before it takes over too much of his life.

So it's constantly like trying things and shrinking things

and trying things and shrinking things.

I look up the part of him that balances work

and being an artist with life

living and family and friends and just being alive,

remembering that that is as important.

This idea of like creative powerhouses

being dismissed from all reasonable behavior

in service of creativity,

that's actually the easy road to be like everything comes second.

You know what I mean,

and it's like so much more interesting to be like that.

Who can balance, who can create that hybrid-y thing?

Hello.

I definitely am conscious of turning 50.

You have this moment to look back.

And then look forward like what is possible now that I'm 50?

They sort of invented my own way to, like, have a studio,

which is just me.

This idea of self-sufficiency.

I don't want to be tied down.

Oh, no.

We are born in the world and we have this

heaviness that we carry with us.

It's just like the nature of being human.

I've created this customized life to like mitigate

deeper feeling of sadness or discontent.

I have chosen a path that leads me through dark.

It's taken my whole life.

Becoming more clearheaded,

becoming more present makes me make better work.

Basically, if I made something that day,

I was happier when I go home.

Like I sort of create my own happiness.

In that the thought passes through.

Dance!