Catherine Goodman: the last house in the world

Catherine Goodman the last house in the world

Cover: Wayfarer (detail), 2015–16, Oil on canvas, 208 x 169 cm Overleaf: Brothers in the South (detail), 2015–16, Oil on canvas, 160 x 170 cm

‘In this town the last house stands As lonely as if it were the last house in the world…’

RAINER MARIA RILKE (TRANS. ROBERT BLY)

The poem from A Book of Pilgrimage is fairly bleak—a metaphor for the creative life it naturally gives itself to the painting of the same title in this exhibition. I often read Rilke in the morning before I start work; he takes me into the landscape I am working from as though I were seeing it for the first time, and also as though I had always known it.

Great poetry is fresh and ever-changing—like the landscape itself—no place for cynicism, in this ever-changing world, where humans and animals have passed through but where the light, air, space and trees are the real subject. They open up their personalities the more time you spend with them.

I am very grateful to my friends Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman for sharing Borgo Pignano, their Italian home.

They have let me work there whenever I can, it has an extraordinary and unusual beauty in the Etruscan landscape.

18 November 2016–14 January 2017

Marlborough Fine Art 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY + 44 (0)20 7629 5161 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com www.marlboroughlondon.com

Catherine Goodman the last house in the world

Catherine Goodman HANNAH ROTHSCHILD

Catherine Goodman’s wonderfully bold, vivacious and enigmatic landscapes are distillations of memory and of imagination. An inveterate traveller, a teacher, film buff and a voracious reader, Goodman’s influences range from Rembrandt to Rilke, from Frans Hals to Ted Hughes, from Titian to Tarkovsky. Most of the subjects in this exhibition are the landscapes she returns to again and again—a farm in Italy, a village in India and a house in Scotland. ‘It takes time to build a relationship with a place, just as it does with a person,’ she says. ‘Places have strong personalities and every room, every view is as personal as a portrait.’

During a friendship that’s lasted over three decades, Goodman and I have travelled to many places including India, Bhutan, Spain, Scotland, Italy and Greece. She trails through airports and train stations with an assortment of exploding bags—some containing paints, pencils, a drawing board, others with clothes, some with both. On arrival, the first thing she does is stake out a place to set up her easel or board. For Goodman, work always comes before fun or sightseeing. She endures wasp stings and blazing sun, foregoes excursions and shopping trips in order to capture an idea on paper. She never paints large canvases en plein air but takes the drawings back to the studio (even more bags on the return journey, paint spattered clothes, rolls of finished work). ‘I would find it hard,’ she says, ‘to make meaningful big work in a landscape. It’s important to work in a studio from drawings because somehow the imaginative life has more free rein.’

The preparatory drawings, in charcoal, gouache, pencil, become ‘the armature or the scaffold’ of every piece of work. For over thirty years, Goodman has drawn every single day. ‘Drawings hold the smells and the bones, memories, feelings and the structure of everything I do. If I lost my drawings I wouldn’t be able to make the paintings. A photograph won’t do. However good a photograph is, it gives you one rather than layers of memory.’

Goodman keeps her drawings in an old chest or in piles. Her Chelsea studio is a riot of objects, paint tubes, brushes, rags and partially worked up canvases. In one corner there is a bed, in another there is her friend Lucian Freud’s old easel. Her paint encrusted palette has become three dimensional, sculptural. There are boxes of spent oil paint. Indian masks, souvenirs from foreign trips and drawings are pinned to the walls. Rifling through a selection of pastels she explains how one of the large oils in the exhibition, a hammock hanging in an Italian wood, was the result of many hours of preparatory sketches. The glade of trees was a ‘hang out’ for her students who liked to talk and smoke there after classes. It was the hammock’s ‘shroud-like yellow rope in a dark wood’ that caught Goodman’s interest and she returned at different times of the day over the next fortnight to capture the changing light and atmosphere. ‘Something I have learned from the great paintings at The National Gallery is that a Poussin or a Rembrandt were not made quickly,’ she says. ‘There’s a sense of the time it takes to capture those feelings and pin them down. It’s a slow release so you don’t get everything in the first shot, you need to stay with them.’ Only a fraction of her drawings become paintings but there was something about the hammock, the trees around it and the colours that had her ‘chomping’.

ABOVE

White Tree, 2015–16, Oil on canvas, 178 x 160 cm

Like the other landscapes in this exhibition, the hammock picture is uninhabited by human forms; the students have left, mere ghosts in her memory.

Another work, White Tree, inspired by residency in India, is, she says, all about the women who used to congregate in the village centre and talk. In the finished painting however, the women have vanished leaving only their water pots, a series of interlocking circles in the foreground. A painting of a fragile palapa in Italy, shelter from a burning sun, is also unpeopled. So too is a picture of an abandoned glass house and even the huge ornate mirror carries no reflections. This air of desolation is reflected in the title of the exhibition taken from a line in a poem by Rilke; ‘The last house of this village stands as alone as if it were the last house in the world.’ Partly because of the absence of human life but also because so many of the man-made structures appear so desperately fragile, on the cusp of being dismantled by time and nature, the works are suffused with a strong sense of loneliness and temporality. I ask Goodman if these were the feelings, the atmosphere she was trying to convey. Used to her answering questions quickly, in articulate and thoughtful sentences, I’m surprised by the long hesitation. ‘I suppose that is how I encounter the world’, she says. ‘I am a quite untrusting person. This is partly coming from a refugee background because of my grandparents being immigrants and for the whole of my childhood I wondered if we were staying here or going back to Russia. Life felt very temporary.’ She continues to muse on the question of loneliness and how it affects her and her work. ‘I have an increasing sense of the fragility of things—maybe it’s my age or watching my parents dying but I’m more aware of mortality. It’s important to observe how transitory everything is. Painting is a way of keeping things which have been blown away.’

To many, these answers might be surprising; Goodman is hugely popular. She gives the impression of being grounded and utterly sure of her priorities. Her friendships span all generations and backgrounds. She champions individuals and causes, particularly those in need, with gentle ferocity. Unlike many painters, Goodman isn’t welded to one place or studio.

She lives in Kensal but spends a significant amount of time with her parents, sisters, nieces and nephews at the family home in Kensington. Her main studio is in Chelsea but there are borrowed spaces in other parts of town. To many creative people, Goodman’s lifestyle would be distracting, possibly destabilising . ‘You have to construct an area of virtual simplicity even if your life isn’t at all simple,’ she says. ‘There is an austerity within a creative life as it is essentially a lonely furrow so you have to construct some kind of cave that others aren’t allowed into.’ Within the peripatetic existence, she uses the practice of drawing, prayer and meditation to anchor her creativity. ‘Being able to access the imaginative life is the hardest thing, particularly in this Metropolitan city. Meditation gives you a platform of silence that is a springboard for the day. Like getting in to the cold water. Austerity means that your imaginative life becomes more active.’

A proportion of Goodman’s week is spent in Shoreditch at the Royal Drawing School, an institution she co-founded with the Prince of Wales in 2000 in order to address the decline in observational drawing programmes at contemporary art schools. Although she has stepped back from the daily managing of the institution, she’s still its Artistic Director and an Academic Board Member. The amount of time she has dedicated to the school has come at a price. ‘I am sure that my painting career has suffered, I am sure I am seen as a teacher not an artist,’ she says. Nevertheless she also sees teaching as a kind of duty. ‘If you look at music and dance, teaching is something that is done by everyone—you would not have a great ballerina or pianist not teaching and something very odd has happened in art education where teaching is seen as something that ‘those who can’t do, teach’ rather than a responsibility to pass it on.’ She points out that the great tradition of ‘I am a quite untrusting one master handing on the baton to another has been broken. Frank person. This is partly coming Auerbach will be one of the last artists who can trace his artistic lineage back to Ingres via the teachings of Bomberg, Sickert and Degas. from a refugee background

because of my grandparents being immigrants and for the whole of my childhood I wondered if we were staying here or going back to Russia.

Life felt very temporary.’

Goodman acknowledges more personal reasons for teaching.

‘I didn’t have a family so the Drawing School has been a replacement for children.’ Most people average between two and four children: Goodman has taught and nurtured over two thousand young people, many of whom are establishing successful careers in the art world. She also credits teaching with improving her practice. ‘I like explaining things and I like being challenged. Teaching is about clearly laying out your own feelings and thoughts and insights. I see it as an extension of drawing. I am not interested in showing people how to do something but am interested in showing how the world looks to me and to hear how it looks to them and to help them achieve that.’

Goodman was trained at London’s Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts, and at the Royal Academy Schools where she won the Royal Academy Gold Medal in 1987. Her painting of Antony Sutch won First Prize in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in 2002, following which the museum commissioned Catherine’s painting of Dame Cicely Saunders, for its collection. In 2014, the NPG gave her a solo exhibition, Portraits from Life, and at the same time, Colnaghi Fine Art showed Drawing from Veronese, a collection of works inspired by frequent visits to the National Gallery.

Though deeply serious about her work, friendships and family, Goodman’s tremendous sense of fun and mischief is shown with the two portraits in this exhibition inspired by favourite films from which she and students draw once a week: the child from Satyajit Ray’s Apu and the monkey from Arabian Nights. The latter, an impish and irrepressible character almost bounces out of the canvas. Who is it?, I ask. Goodman giggles and eventually reveals that it is a portrait of her mother. The only recognisable portrait in the exhibition, Wayfarer, of the soldier and writer Harry Parker, shimmers with movement. From some angles, Harry disappears and his form becomes a series of fleeting marks, brush strokes, dabs and flashes of vibrant colour to create an impressionistic likeness. Then you shift your gaze and he reappears. It is a portrait of a person but it is also a depiction of the shifting sands, the ebbs and flows of any human relationship.

Standing in her studio surrounded by unstretched canvases pinned to the wall, her bare feet in leather sandals, paint spattered clothes, a yellow smudge on her cheek, Goodman looks incredibly young, girlish almost. She has just returned from taking a group of students to Italy and is planning a similar teaching trip to Scotland. She talks about poetry, a transcription of a picture at the National Gallery, how she’s struggling with one portrait but is pleased by the progress of another. There’s a new Monday night meditation group and the students’ film night is starting again. Watching her, I can’t help thinking that for the title of the show I might have chosen another line from the same Rilke poem: ‘A place of transition’ is an apposite description of Goodman’s constantly evolving, dynamic and exciting world.

Hannah Rothschild, Writer and Filmmaker

Catherine Goodman: the last house in the world DR CLAUDIA TOBIN

Catherine Goodman’s paintings have a feeling of animal life about them.

Her recent work attends to the feeling and form of the non-human world in a way that translates her fascination with the instinctual, untamed vitality the animal embodies. This exhibition includes representational imagery of animals—a monkey from Arabian Nights splayed on a velvety crimson backdrop, and the luscious red parrot inspired by a Deccan miniature— but it also reveals a less definable form of the ‘creaturely’. If her paintings of India exhibited in 2012 expressed a certain wildness, which made itself visible in the breaking down of form and surface, then the recent works pursue this in a more meditative and exploratory new language.

The intuition and primal energy of the animal has been readily associated with artists over centuries. This is part of the myth of the artist as one who transgresses the boundary between nature and culture to access the primitive part of the self more familiar in childhood. One might think of the poet Ted Hughes, who considered his poems as animals with ‘a vivid life of their own’ (as he described in Poetry and Meaning); or the predatory, animal intensity often associated with Lucian Freud, both of whom were known to Goodman. Her conception of her practice has a distinctive vitalism, which is of a different kind to Hughes or Freud.

There is a generosity in her openness to the untamed; an approach to Her paintings appear to have the subject that allows for sympathetic distance as well as intimacy. a life of their own, a fantasy A badger pelt waistcoat of Hughes’ hangs in her studio, and this sense of inhabiting—of taking on the skin of a subject—is a suggestive symbol one can pursue in her studio for the metamorphosis we encounter in different ways in her work. Her where the canvases hang paintings appear to have a life of their own, a fantasy one can pursue unstretched and unframed in her studio where the canvases hang unstretched and unframed as as if not yet tamed while if not yet tamed while she works on them. These worked over, layered canvases bear the record of sensation and vigorous gestural contact, she works on them. the volatility and exhilaration of making in paint.

Goodman invites us to read the different ‘faces’ of the natural world—often the same scene—drawn or painted at different times of the day, in shifting light and weather, with the attention and receptivity we give to human faces, and to portraits. The limitation of labelling her work by genre is evident—its hybridity exceeds the categories of portrait or landscape. As she has pointed out, making portraits involves the process of getting to know one’s subject, and this also applies to landscapes, which she enters with her senses alert.

Despite the marginality of human presence, these feel like inhabited paintings. The trees blown about under a roiling blue sky in Four Sisters were painted from a drawing made on a Tuscan hillside, and express the boisterously dynamic relationship intimated by the title; yet they are as much about the slap and swoop of paint on canvas. The gestural areas of sky feel as though they were shaped by the elements, recalling Peter Lanyon’s ‘glider’ paintings

or ‘airscapes’ as he called them.

Such works convey Goodman’s characteristic responsiveness to the physical and cultural worlds of the places she paints, whether in Italy, Scotland, or India; but these are not, or not exclusively, descriptive paintings about particular places.

Rather, they transmit the feeling of what it means to be a sensing, imagining body in those spaces.

ABOVE

Red Earth, 2015–16, Pastel on paper, 48 x 63 cm

Drawing from life functions as a way of taking the temperature of a new place, ‘a way in’ as she describes it.

Her drawings are at the vital centre of her practice. She thinks of them as ‘alive’ and they hold a charge and energy that she returns to again and again to fuel her paintings. The idiom of a particular landscape is registered on the level of line: the light, wispier mark that captures the light and insubstantiality of the Scottish highlands in Glenmuick; or the electric burst of colour over brooding tropical foliage in Red Earth. We recognise a shared language, which relates the muscular forms of trees, given space and presence in the recent drawings, to the supple human bodies she regularly draws from paintings by Veronese and Rubens at The National Gallery. The lithographs feel like a continuation of this practice: they preserve the pace and intensity of drawing from film in rapid, liquid lines.

The absence of the human in many of the works conveys a sense of solitude, silence and aloneness but not, one feels, of loneliness. ‘The last house in the world’, a quotation from Rilke’s poem in The Book of Pilgrimage is a suggestive point of entrance.

Goodman’s work shares with the poet a sense of profound interiority, of attention tuned toward the inner as well as the outer life, which makes the art of poet and painter a form of meditation. She is attracted to the musical and rhythmical life of a poem, the feeling that it has a life of its own distilled within a small space.

Reading Rilke’s poem after painting her work of the same title, she found a sense of coincidence, ‘the image matched the feeling’.

RIGHT

Glenmuick, 2015–16, Pastel on paper, 75 x 51.5 cm

A line of thought about the psychic resonance of the house and its role in the creative imagination connects Rilke to Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher and author of

The Poetics of Space. In his book Bachelard describes the universality of the ‘hut dream’: ‘the dreamer of refuges dreams of a hut, of a nest, or of nooks and corners in which he would like to hide away, like an animal in its hole’. In the history of art, the ‘dream of the hut’ recalls the image of the hermit dwelling in remote solitude (one thinks of paintings of St Jerome), but it also makes itself felt in works from Cozens’ sombre watercolour, Peasant’s Hut between Naples and Portici, to Cézanne’s paintings of abandoned houses set in the landscape surrounding Aix-en-Provence.

ABOVE

Goodman’s ‘last house’ is described in cool blue and ash-silver tones licked by streaks of

orning Palapa, M 2015–16, Oil on canvas, 138 x 174 cm

orange and salmon paint, which call attention to the bare bones of its geometry and the branches of the surrounding trees. The canvas is worked over to the edges, the coarsened, gritty texture evoking the roughness of bark and the weathered surface of the hut. Set slightly back from the picture plane and hunched enigmatically within the trees, it is a compelling, haunting image. A half hidden, dilapidated house is an invitation to the imagination: was it once a refuge for a lone wanderer, a site of pilgrimage, a child’s den? An artist’s studio? One recalls Bachelard’s question, ‘How […] in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence? How did he relish the very special silence of the various retreats of solitary daydreaming?’ Goodman’s recent ‘retreats of solitary daydreaming’ take us to Italy, India, and Scotland but also into less chartable territories of memory and imagination. One comes full circle in learning that she wrote her thesis on Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space while an undergraduate at Camberwell School of Art. The hut or house in its many forms has long been part of the iconography of Goodman’s painting and a frequent subject in her work made in Manali, a hill station in the Himalayas, where she returns each year. In her recent work we encounter other provisional structures, including palapas and hammocks. According to Bachelard ‘every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination’. Are these Goodman’s symbols of solitude for the imagination? These temporary structures are made for human repose and shelter yet they are open to the elements, as much symbols of transience and the fleeting mark man makes upon the earth, and in paint. We experience the ‘shelter’ in Small Grey Palapa at close range and from an intimate perspective, almost as if we were underneath it. The canvas is smaller than its companion piece, Morning Palapa, but the enlarged scale of the umbrella evokes a child’s perception. Part of the visceral attraction of these paintings is about such shifts in scale and spatial ambiguity. The viewer’s encounter is important to the artist. Her paintings make the familiar unfamiliar, inviting us to feel our way in and at times to return to the strangeness of the encounters we experience in childhood. There is an impression of the creaturely here too; one can almost feel the bristly texture of the straw shelter as if we have crawled into the habitat of an animal, experiencing it with physical intimacy.

Goodman’s Russian heritage infuses her creative imagination and its great literary and cinematic traditions are touchstones in her practice. The atmosphere of The Last House in the World is permeated by the visual worlds of the great twentieth-century Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Watching and drawing from his films has been an ongoing activity for Goodman, a way of ‘feeding off another’s eye’, to use her visceral phrase. There is also a link between Rilke and Tarkovsky, which is not only intuitive or personal to the artist. Rilke travelled through Russia in the late nineteenth century, finding in its vast cultural and physical landscape a ‘spiritual motherland’, which fuelled his writing of The Book of Pilgrimage.

As he observed in later years, ‘All the home of my instinct, all my inward origin is there’.

A similarly intense connection to Russia’s cultural and spiritual tradition ripples through Goodman’s imaginative life. Her recent work is haunted by Tarkovsky’s seminal exploration of the force of time in human lives, or ‘sculpting in time’ as he titled his book of writings on cinema. In the Mood recalls the elemental imagery of his 1975 film The Mirror, a meditation on memory, time and war, and its ambiguous movement between different temporal frames.

The scene in Goodman’s painting is spliced into three parts by searing vertical lines but the boundaries between the interior and the snow-blurred exterior and between the material and illusory world remain ambiguous. We are led into the oneiric space of the mirror.

Layers of images vanish and sometimes reappear over the gestation of a work, eliciting a sense of excavation, as the surface becomes the living texture of the present, enlivening and interpenetrating the past.

Historically employed as a vanitas motif, the trope of the mirror in art has often been associated with the myth of Narcissus as an implicit rebuke to human vanity and a memento mori. For the artist of In the Mood, the mirror functions as a ‘shield’, a symbol of protection. There is a votive quality to this painting: its grand scale and the position of the mirror set above eye level in its gold frame, bears a relationship to an icon or altarpiece, where the act of raising one’s eyes to the deity is a stimulus for spiritual devotion. Despite the peripheral distraction of the swirling snow ‘outside’, the central magnetism and warm resplendence of the mirror compels one’s gaze, animated by dashes of gold paint. The counterpart pastel drawing similarly leaps off the black paper, its exuberant line tracing the ornamentation of the frame.

There is sense of anticipated action in several of Goodman’s unpeopled scenes, which is closely linked to her narrative impulse. Her densely reworked surfaces are suggestive of palimpsests. Layers of images vanish and sometimes reappear over the gestation of a work, eliciting a sense of excavation, as the surface becomes the living texture of the present, enlivening and interpenetrating the past. As she worked on these paintings, a cast of shadowy characters drawn from fiction and memory made their entrances and exits. Only a few remain visible: in Morning Palapa one distinguishes a ghostly-blue figure hovering on the fence as if on a boundary line (a visual quotation from The Mirror); while In the Mood reveals a motionless figure in the snowy landscape, whether a statue or living person it is left for the viewer to decide. These elusive figures direct their gaze away from an audience, facing an elsewhere. As we grow accustomed to the dynamic surface of Brothers in the South the flaming yellow tree and red hammock take centre stage, sun drenched and magnificent against the muddied tones of the wood. With the luxuriance of red impasto and tassels of orange-gold the image connotes not simply leisure or ease, but also theatre. On closer inspection the corner of the painting reveals the form of a young girl, her back to the viewer, gazing into the woods. Her presence somehow shifts the tone, making it a painting about absorbed looking and introspection—hers, and ours. She summons the dream world of childhood and on one level the girl is a self-portrait of the artist as a young child. The strangeness and irreverent energy of children strikes a different note in Apu’s Son, where the viewer is confronted face-on by a bow and arrow and a grinning blue mask, which transforms the figure of a young boy.

Goodman has recently pursued her fascination with masks by painting a collection brought back from India. Reading—and transforming— the human face has long been part of her practice. She has spent much of her working life painting portraits from life, sometimes spending years with her sitters. Her interest in the ‘imprint’ of a person dynamises Wayfarer, her monumental painting of Harry Parker, soldier and writer, which was painted from his ‘after-image’ following a portrait made in 2014. We recognise new freedoms and spontaneity in the dancing, gestural swirls and swoops of the brush and exuberance of the palette—Harry’s colours—Goodman calls them. There are passages nearing the muscular, gestural abstraction of the American abstract expressionists. The left arm almost dissolves in a molten mass of colour and the riotous movement conveyed by lush swirls of the brush and audacious colour combinations releases the image from conventional portraiture. It is in such passages that the musicality and rhythmic quality of the painting expresses itself most strongly, revealing a distinctive exploratory language. Goodman was struck by the writer Vikram Seth’s description of classical sitar player, Ustad Ali Khan, who seemed to ‘play for himself’ rather than for an audience, and a similar sense of spontaneous performance emanates from this work. It calls to mind Wallace Stevens’ musician-poet in The Man with the Blue Guitar, who when questioned as to why he does not represent things ‘as they are’, replies: ‘Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar’.

Goodman’s recent works are at once paintings about painting, memory and vision, the transience of human beings and their desire for refuge; and perhaps foremost, about delight in paint, line and colour, and the imaginative life it can convey.

BELOW

Wayfarer, 2015–16, Oil on canvas, 208 x 169 cm

Goodman’s painting does not detach itself entirely from the world of representation and symbols. Despite Harry’s grounded pose, we see a body under pressure and in flux: the torso almost appears concave, and the figure emerges as if muscling his way out from the vortex of brushstrokes. This is a portrait of the archetypal wounded artist: a vulnerable yet affirmative figure who carries a bow and arrows, or sheaf of paintbrushes, a pictorial metaphor for the artist’s tools, which makes reference to Georg Baselitz’s series of ‘hero’ soldier-painters.

Goodman’s recent works are at once paintings about painting, memory and vision, the transience of human beings and their desire for refuge; and perhaps foremost, about delight in paint, line and colour, and the imaginative life it can convey. They are paintings that show how ‘Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar’.

Dr Claudia Tobin is a writer and curator specialising in modern literature and visual culture. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, and from 2017 will hold a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge.

Catherine Goodman in her Studio: An interview with Andrea Rose

AR: Let’s talk about Harry.

AR: What’s the difference between having

CG: I first met Harry when he came to the

him sitting for you, and painting him without his being there?

Drawing School. It was very soon after he was up on his prosthetics and able to walk again after his injuries. He’d been to Falmouth Art School before going into the army, and I think he just wanted to do some drawing classes at the School. I went to meet him at the entrance, and as we were going up to the drawing studios in the lift, I had this extraordinary feeling of being in the presence of someone tremendously alive— full of vitality and creativity. I suppose it was partly anger too—there’s anger in all of us—but he deals with it so well, if it’s there at all any more. There’s no sense of victimhood about him.

I had this weird sensation, after drawing and painting him for a couple of years, of seeing him on the back of my retina. There was an imprint of him in me that has become the image I’ve made of him. I used to paint my sister Sophie often—not many have survived— but as a result I carry an image of her within me. It was rather the same with Harry.

AR: When did you start painting him?

CG: I’ve been painting him for two years.

He came to sit for me every Monday night, and we became great friends. We talked— we still talk—about writing, poetry, painting.

But he didn’t sit for this recent painting.

I wanted to paint a much bigger image of him, with greater fluidity and freedom; an expression of the extraordinary life that’s pulsating through him.

G: I couldn’t have painted this picture if C he’d been there. I’d seen this early drawing

by Baselitz of a wounded artist who, instead of having arrows sticking into the back of him, had a sheaf of paintbrushes. Savaged by paintbrushes! Somehow that drawing made me think of Harry—about heroism of a sort, though the last thing Harry would want is to be thought of as a hero. Not having him there in front of me gave me the freedom to paint an image of a person rather than the person himself. Sometimes you feel constrained by the need for a certain literalness when someone is sitting there. You want to get the life under the skin, but in order to do it, you also need the skin.

AR: Did you use any of your earlier

drawings to create the image of Harry— or perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it an after-image?

CG: After-image is right in a way. I had this weird sensation, after drawing and painting him for a couple of years, of seeing him on the back of my retina. There was an imprint of him in me that has become the image I’ve made of him. I used to paint my sister Sophie often— not many have survived—but as a result I carry an image of her within me. It was rather the same with Harry. I did use my drawings of him, but as I was painting him, of course, the image changed: it almost seemed to be beyond my control. He grew—scale becomes an important indicator of feeling—and the space he inhabits becomes increasingly ambiguous, as the paint flows between ground and surface.

It’s as if he is there and not there, moving in and out of perception, constantly evolving.

Like painting itself you could say.

AR: Spatial ambiguity is a feature

AR: Does it matter to you to know a

in a number of your works in this exhibition. In the Mood, for example, is an extraordinary image of a mirror reflecting the interior of the room to you, while on either side there are snowy landscapes. It’s both inside and outside, mirror and glass, appearance and disappearance.

place well when you begin painting it?

G: Hot and cold, too. And the warmth C of the gold inside the room against the whiteness of the snow outside. I sometimes think of these paintings like tapestries, with their warp and weft. You see the landscape though the French windows on either side of the wall with the ornate Dutch mirror on it, and the sky’s blueness seems to become part of the mirroring of the room. It’s in the far north—in Scotland—in a house I know very well.

CG: To paint, yes. I always draw when I’m somewhere I don’t know well, or haven’t visited before, like the two drawings of Caledonian pines in Mallorca in the show.

It’s a way of getting to know a place, of feeling your way around the unfamiliar.

And drawings are about feeling at their most elemental: you pour your feelings into drawings, while the act of painting requires greater detachment. But I’ve been visiting the house in Scotland for twenty years. It’s somewhere that gives me time to think, and resolve things. Its familiarity, I suppose, breeds new freedoms. And it’s full of old things in the way that the house I grew up in was, although most of the things in our house were broken or chipped, which they’re not in Scotland.

AR: It shares something with the paintings

of your parents' flat that you showed in your last exhibition, doesn’t it, paintings about intimacy, the meaning of objects?

G: Yes, images hold meanings. Scale C becomes ambiguous because memory is fluid, so takes on different aspects and shapes.

‘I’ve tried to paint narrative before, but the figures seem to get in the way. They become too prominent, too central. Maybe this is a way of painting a story that isn’t yet told. But then, as Lucian Freud said: “All paintings are portraits, aren’t they, whatever the subject.”’

AR: The majority of the paintings in this

show are of another place you know well, aren’t they?

CG: Yes, the other landscapes are of Pignano, in Tuscany. I’ve been going there for ten years. For a couple of years I didn’t feel I could paint it at all, I just did drawings, but it was a wonderful prompt for my work. I suppose I feel that I’ve a northern spirit—my mother is Russian and there was always an imaginative Russian life going on at home.

Maybe it was a sense of things lost but also a sense that one day they might be found—a strange sense of both belonging and not belonging. I was reminded of Rilke’s poem about a northern spirit being drawn to the south—the heat, the exoticism, and the slow unfolding of Italy’s art and culture—and then in Pignano, I was drawn to particular places.

AR: What do you think characterises

those places? They mostly seem to have temporary structures in them—for example the hammock stretched across trees in a dense part of the woods. Do you feel with the hammock that it’s a portrait of someone not there—a physical presence denied, as it is with the portrait of Harry?

G: There is a figure in it actually, a small C figure, a child in the lower right corner.

AR: Is that you?

CG: Maybe. I’ve tried to paint narrative before, but the figures seem to get in the

way. They become too prominent, too central. Maybe this is a way of painting a story that isn’t yet told. But then, as Lucian Freud said: ‘All paintings are portraits, aren’t they, whatever the subject.’

AR: Another of your large Pignano

paintings The Last House in the World is also of woods, this time with a small building in it. The colour appears bleached out, as if you are seeing the image on a photographic negative, and only the red remains. And the scale is disorientating.

The trees tower over the building, which nestles among them as if it’s in hiding, as if it’s a secret place.

CG: It’s not so much a secret, as somewhere that no longer exists. It was a children’s playhouse when I first came to it, and built to a curious scale. It was almost big enough for children to get into, but not quite. And it was dilapidated. In fact, it’s been cleared away since then, so it’s more like an afterimage. Someone said to me that it reminded them of the burned out remains of a house I once lived in—and maybe it has that sense of somewhere that no longer physically exists but remains in your memory. It’s a springboard into memory—perhaps not even an exact memory, but somewhere that exists between past and present, an invented interval.

AR: It’s that ambiguity that’s also going

on in your other works, isn’t it?

CG: Possibly. I was incredibly influenced by Tarkovsky when I was a student. I actually went to see him giving a talk when I was in my first year at Camberwell. I was 18, and he would have been quite old (in fact, he was only in his fifties, but he seemed old, and was to die not long after). The images in his films, Mirror, in particular, have always been important to me. Maybe it’s a sense of Russianness, of otherness, even though I was born here. I’ve always been conscious of the life journey of my grandmother— losing the closest members of her family during the war, a desire to hold onto the hope that things might be different and they could return some day, and her humour and warmth. Maybe the mirror is mirroring

something that is there only as a reflection.

That’s why scale is so important in my work—when I draw I draw to scale, but in paintings, the scale shifts, grows, changes of its own volition, as if I am no longer in control of it.

AR: There’s another temporary

structure in Pignano that you’ve painted, Morning Palapa.

CG: When I first saw it, I was drawn to the

animal-like quality of the straw roofing.

It was like fur—organic, with a life and a will of its own. It’s a shelter put up for children against the glare of the sun. They used to have lessons there during the day.

I was drawn to it because it’s like a pause in this particular place; a sort of shrine in the woods, a place to stop and contemplate.

The furry roof seems to have become allenveloping in this painting.

AR: Is the pink chair at the bottom of

the painting another portrait—of you?

CG: It’s a pink plastic chair, gone now as has the palapa, but it’s a memory, a shadow, a shadow-play, if you like, of what was there.

AR: Shadow-play is a good term for the two

paintings you are showing made from films. They’re odd and surprising—one of a child with a bow and arrow shooting directly at us; the other of a monkey in a blue robe, tethered by a rope. Why do you paint from films, and how do you do it?

CG: I don’t work from photographs—they’re too static—but I do like the speed and fluency of film. Somehow you become part of the action, part of the film when you’re watching it, and I like to watch and then stop the film and draw quickly from it. I get my students to do it too. They can call out at a particular scene, and we stop the action, and they have six minutes to produce a drawing.

AR: The image of the little boy is from

Satyajit Ray, isn’t it?

CG: Yes, it’s from Pather Panchali, the first film in his World of Apu trilogy. I liked this particular image because it reminds me of when I was a child and had a bow and arrow

and used to go shooting in the woods. And it also reminds me of India, where I’ve been going to paint twice a year for 25 years, though I’m not showing any Indian work in this exhibition. But Apu is a coming-ofage film, when Apu is seen as a young boy wandering around west Bengal after his father has fallen on hard times. The west Bengal countryside is quite amazing—so vast, so unfathomable—and it gives the young child an unparalleled freedom. It’s the enormous freedom for a child that I loved about it. Maybe that’s what painting allows you to do—to roam around within limitless imaginative spaces and finally to find your target and take aim at it.

AR: And what draws you to

particular targets?

CG: I don’t feel it’s something external, which I suddenly light on and think, goodness, that’s what I want to draw. It’s a vocabulary that comes from within. It’s rather like Henry Moore talking about natural forms and why he was drawn to them. It wasn’t the stone itself, he said, but how the stone reflected something that was already in his mind, and which he would then add onto in some way. He used a nice phrase to describe it: ‘The eye sees something that is in the mind already.’

Painting for me is the same. The monkey is from Pasolini’s Arabian Nights. It’s a painting about containment, and reminds me of my mother—that’s just how it is. And among the drawings I’m showing, there’s a brightly coloured parrot in the branches of a tree, pecking away at a mango while a lamb walks underneath. It’s after a Deccani painting that I saw in India—a vibrant connection between the world of 400 years ago and today, a reminder that the past is always with us, but the way we see it is always new.

That’s what painting can do—it’s a magical slipway linking what we see with what we know, and each individual artist has to find his or her way of re-making it.

Andrea Rose, former Director of Visual Arts at the British Council, is currently working on the catalogue raisonné of Leon Kossoff's paintings.

List of works

1.

T HE LAST HOUSE IN THE WORLD 2015–16 Oil on canvas 186 x 172 cm

9.

A PU’S SON 2015–16 Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm

2. B ROTHERS IN THE SOUTH 2015–16 Oil on canvas 160 x 170 cm

10.

S MALL HAMMOCK 2015–16 Oil on board 15 x 23.9 cm

3.

WAYFARER 2015–16 Oil on canvas 208 x 169 cm

11.

T ROLLY 2015–16 Oil on board 19.7 x 29.8 cm

4.

F OUR SISTERS 2015–16 Oil on canvas 154 x 188 cm

12.

H OT LOGS 2015–16 Oil on board 30 x 30 cm

5. I N THE MOOD 2015–16 Oil on canvas 171 x 204 cm

13.

M ORNING PALAPA II 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm*

6.

S MALL GREY PALAPA 2015–16 Oil on canvas 95 x 125 cm

14. G LENMUICK 2015–16 Pastel on paper 75 x 51.5 cm*

7.

W HITE TREE 2015–16 Oil on canvas 178 x 160 cm

15.

E MERALD SKIN 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm*

8.

A RABIAN NIGHTS 2015–16 Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm

16. H AMMOCK II 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm*

*sizes of the drawings may vary

17. H AMMOCK I 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm*

25. RED EARTH 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm*

18.

R ODEO 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm*

26. PARROT 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm*

19. H ILLSIDE 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm*

27.

R EFUGEE CHILD 2015–16 Lithograph on paper 51 x 38 cm

20.

G REY PALAPA 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm*

28.

M IRROR 2015–16 Lithograph on paper 42 x 55 cm

21. F OUR SISTERS EVENING 2015–16 Pastel on paper 54 x 63 cm*

29. I N A LIFT 2015–16 Lithograph on paper 32 x 42 cm

22.

L A POSADA I 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm*

30.

B LUE NOSE 2015–16 Lithograph on paper 35 x 40 cm

23. L A POSADA II 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm* 24.

E VENING MIRROR 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm*

Paintings

1.

T HE LAST HOUSE IN THE WORLD 2015–16 Oil on canvas 186 x 172 cm

2.

B ROTHERS IN THE SOUTH 2015–16 Oil on canvas 160 x 170 cm

3.

W AYFARER 2015–16 Oil on canvas 208 x 169 cm

4.

F OUR SISTERS 2015–16 Oil on canvas 154 x 188 cm

5. I N THE MOOD 2015–16 Oil on canvas 171 x 204 cm

6.

S MALL GREY PALAPA 2015–16 Oil on canvas 95 x 125 cm

7.

W HITE TREE 2015–16 Oil on canvas 178 x 160 cm

8. A RABIAN NIGHTS 2015–16 Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm

9.

A PU’S SON 2015–16 Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm

10.

S MALL HAMMOCK 2015–16 Oil on board 15 x 23.9 cm 11.

T ROLLY 2015–16 Oil on board 19.7 x 29.8 cm 12.

H OT LOGS 2015–16 Oil on board 30 x 30 cm

Drawings

13.

M ORNING PALAPA II 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm

14. G LENMUICK 2015–16 Pastel on paper 75 x 51.5 cm

15.

E MERALD SKIN 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm

16.

H AMMOCK II 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm

17.

H AMMOCK I 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm

18.

R ODEO 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm

19.

H ILLSIDE 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm

20.

G REY PALAPA 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm

21. F OUR SISTERS EVENING 2015–16 Pastel on paper 54 x 63 cm

22.

L A POSADA I 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm 23.

L A POSADA II 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm

24.

E VENING MIRROR 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm

25. RED EARTH 2015–16 Pastel on paper 48 x 63 cm

26.

P ARROT 2015–16 Pastel on paper 63 x 48 cm

Prints

27.

R EFUGEE CHILD

28.

M IRROR

29.

I N A LIFT

30.

B LUE NOSE

2015-16 Lithograph on paper 51 x 38 cm

2015-16 Lithograph on paper 42 x 55 cm

2015–16 Lithograph on paper 32 x 42 cm

2015–16 Lithograph on paper 35 x 40 cm

Biography

1961 Born in London

LITERATURE

1979–84 Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts, London

Jake Auerbach, Two London Painters, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 2004

1984–87 Royal Academy Schools, London 1987 Royal Academy Gold Medal 2000–07 Director, The Prince’s Drawing School, Artistic Director from 2008 2002 BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London, First Prize 2015 Portrait of the film director Stephen Frears acquired by the National Portrait Gallery

Lives and works in London

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1988–95 Four solo exhibitions at Cadogan Contemporary, London 1997 Theo Waddington Fine Art, London 2008 New Paintings, Marlborough Fine Art, London 2012 Worlds Within, Marlborough Fine Art, London 2014 Portraits from Life, The National Portrait Gallery, London

Drawing from Veronese, Colnaghi, London 2016 The Last House in the World, Marlborough Fine Art, London

G ROUP EXHIBITIONS

2004 Two London Painters: Catherine Goodman and David Dawson, Marlborough Fine Art, London 2006 Drawing Inspiration, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal

Summer Exhibition, Marlborough Fine Art, London 2015

he Last of the Tide, The Queen’s T Gallery, London

Summer Exhibition, Marlborough Fine A Art, London

2016 A Summer Exhibition, Marlborough Fine Art, London

Sandy Nairne and Sarah Howgate, The Portrait Now, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2006

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Worlds Within, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 2012 Sarah Howgate and William Feaver, Portraits from Life, The National Portrait Gallery London, 2014 P RESS Hilary Rose, ‘The Other Royal College of Art’, The Times, 26 April 2008 ‘ Your face on the stairs: the new portraitists’, The Times, 2 November 2010 Karen Wright, ‘In The Studio’, Independent Radar/art, 1 September 2012 ‘Catherine Goodman at Marlborough Fine Art’, The Week, 15 September 2012 Daisy Goodwin, ‘Sitting for a Portrait’, Times2, 24 June 2014 achel Campbell-Johnston, ‘Catherine R Goodman: Portraits from Life’, The Times, 27 September 2014

Maitreyee Bannerjee, ‘Catherine Goodman’s Landscapes and Figures’, Blouin Artinfo.com, 14 July 2016

Marlborough

LONDON Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44 (0)20 7629 5161 Telefax: +44 (0)20 7629 6338 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com info@marlboroughgraphics.com www.marlboroughfineart.com Marlborough Contemporary 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44 (0)20 7629 5161 Telefax: +44 (0)20 7629 6338 info@marlboroughcontemporary.com www.marlboroughcontemporary.com

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Works and studio picture by Richard Ivey Photography Additional photography page 50 by Todd White Design: Shine Design, London Print: Impress Print Services ISBN 978-1-909707-34-4 Catalogue No. 661 2016 Marlborough