CHANGE OF ART.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

ART PREVIEW Progressions What: Paintings by Eugene artist Barry Geller Where: Opus6ix, 22. W. Seventh Ave. When: Through Sept. 30 Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday

Back in the `golden age' of American magazines - that would be the 1950s and '60s, for those of us too young to remember such things - Barry Geller worked for the best of the best.

The young artist's illustrations were in Esquire, Playboy, Cosmopolitan and Redbook. He was on the cover of Fortune. He was in the Saturday Evening Post. You could find his work in Ingenue and in Parents magazine.

And it wasn't just magazine work. His illustrations showed up in newspapers, including New York City's old Herald Tribune.

"It was such fun," the 73-year-old Geller says today, leafing through a portfolio of his work from those days. "I was really getting paid for what I would have been doing anyway."

Always at the back of his mind, though, was a desire to cut loose from the bounds of illustration - telling other people's stories - and start making his own art.

And since moving to Eugene a few years ago, that is exactly what Geller has done, producing a prolific series of acrylic, charcoal and pastel paintings of stylized female nudes. You can see a small show of his work this month at the Opus6ix gallery downtown.

Geller is one of those people who always wanted to be an artist.

He drew pictures as a child growing up in San Francisco and later Redwood City, Calif., before studying art at the University of California, Los Angeles and at San Jose State. He finished up his education at the Los Angeles Art Center, where he learned commercial illustration, and found his first job doing storyboards and backgrounds for a Los Angeles animation studio.

New York beckoned, though, and the young Geller gathered up his portfolio and headed East, landing a job with a New York design firm. Soon, he was free-lancing for an assortment of national magazines, including several years with Playboy.

"Playboy was great to work for," he says. "I never had to send them a bill. They just sent a check. And they sent all their artists bonuses at the end of the year!"

Styles changed, though, and the free-lance work began to dry up. Geller worked for many years with the founders of Transcendental Meditation, of which he was then a follower. He lived in Switzerland while working for TM, and even illustrated a book on meditation.

In 1964, shaken by the Kennedy assassination, he did a painting of Lee Harvey Oswald standing in the window of the Texas Book Depository. A New York art critic selected it for display at the World's Fair held that year near New York - where it was defaced by a viewer and later securely displayed under a thick pane of Plexiglas.

Sitting with Geller today and flipping through his portfolio from those days, you can't help but be struck by the extraordinary range of images he produced in his youth. If you didn't already know, you would hardly suspect they were all by the same artist.

"That's the funny thing," he says. "When I was doing illustration, if you wanted Barry Geller, what you got was what I was doing at the time."

More recently, a gallery owner in Southern California suggested Geller explore his own identity by doing series of paintings in the style of other artists, which he has done.

"Sometimes it takes artists a long time to figure out who they are," he says.

He's been a success in Eugene. His paintings have been in the Mayor's Art Show a couple of times, and one that was rejected was used for a poster two years ago for the Salon des Refuses.

Besides showing at Opus6ix, his work has been exhibited at Karin Clarke Gallery.

Geller is clearly happy now doing fine art, but says he has no regrets about his commercial career.

"It would have been nice to paint more and not worry about supporting a family. But the thing is, now I can paint full time."

Reach Bob Keefer at 338-2325 or [e-mail].