John Goodrich: The Color's the Thing

PURCHASE CATALOGUE

John Goodrich The Color’s the Thing: Recent Paintings January 2-27, 2024

This catalog accompanies: John Goodrich The Color’s the Thing: Recent Paintings January 2-27, 2024 Bowery Gallery 547 W 27 St, New York NY 10001 646-230-6655 · www.bowerygallery.org Hours: Tues-Sat 11-6

FRONT COVER:

Alleys Bay Parking Lot, Beals Island (detail) 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

John Goodrich The Color’s the Thing: Recent Paintings

JANUARY 2-27, 2024 BOWERY GALLERY | 547 W 27th ST, SUITE 508 | NEW YORK NY 10001

Cranberry Cove, Beals Island 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

Inventions of Color John Goodrich Color—ubiquitous but weightless, constant but shifting with every turn of light—provides one of life’s great pleasures. We celebrate its exuberant hues in a flower or sunset, and its opalescent gleam in a foggy landscape.

We adorn our surroundings—our furnishings, homes, even ourselves— according to whatever colors suit our imagination.

How startling it is, then, to consider that color exists only in the mind.

Color is not a physical attribute of nature; it is a product of our neural networks, produced only at the point—or actually, many millions of points— that the rods and cones in our eyes convert light waves into neural signals.

Moreover, our visual systems perform all manner of sleights of hand in delivering to us the colored, 3-D version of the world we’ve come to expect. To reduce the flood of data and broaden our sensitivity to light, our retinas pass on not absolute values, but relative changes in light. Our visual systems compensate continuously for ambient light, so that we can recognize a single object under even dramatically different illuminations.

(This doesn’t always work, as demonstrated by the white dress/bluedress debate that went viral a few years.) We can distinguish between more than five million colors, though virtually none of them corresponds to single wavelengths of light; they are in fact ratios of the signals from our red, green and blue cones. This makes for a few anomalies. There is no purple wavelength, though the combined output of our red and blue cones produces the sensation of this hue. Two different ratios of our cones’ signals sometimes produce the same sensation of color—at least, under a certain illumination; change the light’s temperature, and they may become markedly different. (This phenomenon, metamerism, is the bane of clothing designers and painters alike.)

Our experience of color is, in short, built upon a highly efficient filtering process that keeps us continuously in touch with our surroundings. Like it or not, we see the colors we need to see. This may sound somewhat disappointing to a painter, who depends on two certainties—the measurability of color, and the defining force of line. But this still leaves lines —essentially, the contours of objects—as the stable foundation for our visual experience.

Or does it? Surprising as it sounds, our eyes can focus on only a tiny part of our visual field at any given instant—on a portion equivalent to the diameter of a lime held at arm’s length. Our perception of a scene feels intact only because our eyes constantly move in tiny imperceptible jumps called saccades, in addition to larger, conscious movements. Our visual system assembles our impression of any scene, and preserves it even as we move through it, and the aspect of every object changes. It’s no wonder that over a third of our brains are involved in processing visual signals.

Remarkably, this vastly complicated process we call vision is learned.

As newborns, we knew nothing of the way the world works visually, but in our first months and years we acquired a vast education in how light reveals planes and irregular forms, and how they relate to each other according to our vantage point and the illumination. Having acquired this knowledge, we never look back. We stop seeing fragmented planes

Main Street, Jonesport 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

TOP SKETCH:

A beginner’s drawing of a still life with the tilted-up tabletop.

BOTTOM SKETCH:

What the eye sees (rather than what the mind knows).

and gradients of color, and see what we what need to see: objects. We recognize trees, cars and people.

Art instructors know that the idea of objects overwhelms any innocent perceptions of them; ninety-nine percent of new art students will draw what they know, not what they actually see. In their drawings, they tip up the ground plane of a landscape or the surface of a tabletop to accommodate their preconceptions. Logically, the table’s surface contains the objects; therefore, its drawn outline must also contain them.

In this sense, whether we realize it or not, we are all formalists, reducing floods of sensations into the discrete forms we know. We are savvy about known identities, and oblivious to how things actually appear.

Some of us are also painters, and embark (perhaps foolishly) on a lifetime of studying the possibilities of remaking the purely visible world through the relatively poor means of pigments spread about a surface.

With hard work and luck, we may be able remind the viewer what it means to see. Artists such as Giotto, Rembrandt and Matisse show us a way, having left us accounts of the world that are passionately real, not in terms of the kind of logical preconceptions that might satisfy an academic painter or illustrator, but through another kind of form-making, one based on faithful observation and the rhythms of color and line.

Replicating nature’s colors, it turns out, is anything but straightforward.

Artists’ pigments can only produce contrasts perhaps one-twentieth as powerful as those we might measure in a brightly lit landscape. Representations on screen or in print similarly fall short, although in different ways. A typical screen can reproduce only part of the visible spectrum, and a printed image far less. What’s perhaps most important, artists’ pigments produce sensations untransmissible via even the best screen.

For some reason—perhaps the wide variety of pigments available (compared to the three colors that mix to form screen colors), or the difference between the subtractive mixing of pigments and additive mixing of colored light, or the effects of layered pigments—artists’ colors convey something beyond the technical measurements of hue, tone, and intensity. They communicate what the artist Leland Bell called a “weight” or “pressure,” and these qualities can impart a new momentum to sequences of hues across a canvas.

Colors fill a surface; lines divide it. These would seem to be contradictory forces, but they can also complement each other. The directing force of a line can find its culmination in a note of increased color pressure. The line, in effect, shows where you’re going, and the color provides a reason; a hand tangibly resolves the extension of an arm in a Giotto or Rembrandt. This body-arm-hand sequence may possess a momentousness exceeding any logical disposition of forms. But then, logic has its limits, and the mere apprehension of an arm in space involves so many data points as to exceed reason.

The upward winding tree trunks in a Corot landscape converse with each other, rhythmically expanding and compressing the space between as they surge against the earth’s pull. Bruegel found concentrated pools of activity within broad, lyric circulations; one senses in his paintings an extraordinary co-dependency of micro and macro worlds. Rembrandt, Corot, and Bruegel were formalists in the same manner that we all are, capable of processing a visual flood towards practical ends. They, however, also possessed a remarkably keen eye for nature, and structured

Beals Island Lobster Pound 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

their works perceptually rather than through reason. And arguably, this is the only feasible kind of truth: despite our hunger for efficient cognition, the vastness of data means that the most deeply truthful accounts must be lyrical, not logical. As for Tolstoy and Bach, the truth lies finally in the subsuming of granular insight within a broader, lyric comprehension.

It is our immense good fortune to be able to experience a Bruegel or Corot in its original incarnation. In the case of a creation by a Praxiteles, a Caruso, or a Pushkin, the original expression can be absorbed only through, respectively, Roman copies, crackly recordings, and translations (Russian speakers excepted, of course). Standing in front of Rembrandt’s “Woman with a Pink,” however, we can absorb his every intuition—or at least the powerful flow of his thousands of intuitions marked down in paint.

Just possibly, one day in the early 1660s, after applying his last thought/ stroke, he turned to an onlooker, and commented, “Well, good enough, you think?”—and except for the exigencies of time, we might have been that onlooker. A far more distancing circumstance would be having to view the painting as reproduced on screen or in print, in which case Rembrandt’s topic and style would be preserved, but not what most distinguishes his work: the taut orchestration of color pressures that makes each moment crucial to a gathering whole.

Today we have possibly the most access to great paintings of any generation, but are we making the best use of it? Why do so many museum-goers spend a half-hour in line to see a show, and then (as reported in a 2001 study) linger for a median time of only 17 seconds in front of each painting? Could it be we enjoy the aura of art more than art itself?

Appreciating anything—including painting—for its purely visual aspect requires effort, and the sheer ubiquity of the photograph (a medium capable of profound expression in its own right) probably doesn’t help.

Too often, photographic reproductions of paintings serve as surrogate experiences for the real thing. More perplexing still is the way that photography’s means of description—its evenhanded capturing of intervals and details, so different from the elastic lyricism of painting—seems

to have become our default notion of “realism.” A tree’s trunk may be stout, weather-worn, and arc darkly across the surface. But does that arc accelerate, slow, and prepare for the eruption of a branch? We see what we expect to see, and experiencing painting with eyes attuned to photography hardly helps the case for Bruegel or Corot.

Art history, a major touchstone for assessing art, also can hamper as much as it helps. History’s great strength is its illumination of cultural context.

Why were 14th-century Sienese paintings so elegantly stylized compared to the earthier art of neighboring Florence? We can credit Siena’s commercial ties with the French—a delicious thought. History, though, is less adept at explaining exceptional visual insights. It’s intriguing to learn how a rising merchant class transformed the art market in Rembrandt’s time, but his great achievement lay in his individual perceptions, not in the ways he (like his lesser peers) adapted to a changing society.

Today we’re subject to twin cravings—for the efficiency of cognition supplied by our visual systems and modern technology,and for the intellectual framework afforded by contextual explanations. Neither of these, however, address painting’s purely optical expressions. And these expressions count. They distinguish the greatest painters from lesser ones: Veronese from his student Bassano, Rembrandt from his pupil Nicolaes Maes, Pieter Bruegel the Elder from his far less gifted son, Pieter the Younger.

A better touchstone for assessing a work of visual art might be its maker’s fluency in visual expression. We celebrate Picasso’s brilliant intuitions about drawing and Matisse’s remarkable essays in color.

Even if, arguably, neither possessed Courbet’s simultaneous mastery of line and color, we sense their appetite for the visual, their thorough awareness of painting’s expressive possibilities, and (it naturally follows) their reverence for Courbet. It’s no coincidence that Matisse owned three Courbet paintings, and Picasso one.

Cemetery, Addison 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

Addison Houses 2022, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

Barney’s Cove, Beals Island 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

Public Landing, Beals Island 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

Artist’s statement For any painter, the worst moment to introduce one’s own work would be following a discussion about Rembrandt and Corot. Still, I’ll note that this catalog accompanies my twelfth show at Bowery, and the exhibition includes some thirty paintings, mostly small landscapes executed on site on the coast of Down East Maine. “Characterize through the optical” became a kind of mantra for these works, which proceeded from a few basic assumptions: Visual awareness is founded in light, whose workings we come to understand even before learning to talk. Through this preverbal self-education we develop a mental system for locating every object within our view.

The strength, temperature and direction of light governs a composition. An artist doesn’t paint objects, but rather their “footprints” within a thicket of light.

Nature’s foundations are foundational to painting. The horizon divides the rapidly receding,(mostly) flat ground plane from the open bowl of sky. We look down towards objects below the horizon, up at those above. Objects planted on the earth rise to stitch together the two zones.

Light flows mostly downward, charting each object’s rise against gravity.

Optical paradoxes may assist the characterization of a scene: light becomes weighty as it imprints objects; masses turn buoyant under its pressure.

Painting can’t replicate, hue by hue, the intense colors of nature. But a suggestive equivalent may emerge, according to the artist’s subjective response.

The confinement of a painting to a flat, fixed, finite surface frees up possibilities of rhythmic development. Contrasts of scale and movement emerge, potentially resolving in condensations of detail. All become means for characterizing a scene.

Several other paintings in the exhibition are based on drawings and etchings by Rembrandt. Over the years, these have proved to be especially

TOP:

Honda, Addison 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

BOTTOM:

Truck, Addison 2019, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

OPPOSITE:

Red Umbrella 2023, oil/canvasboard, 16 x 12 in.

TOP:

Pershing Park 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

BOTTOM:

Two Red Peppers 2021-23, oil/board, 14 x 20 in.

OPPOSITE:

Parking Lot, Beals Island 2023, oil/canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.

LEFT:

After Rembrandt’s drawing “Three Women at the Entrance of a House” 2023, oil/canvas, 29 x 21 in.

BELOW:

Rembrandt van Rijn Three Women at the Entrance of a House c.1935, reed pen and ink wash, 10 x 7½ in.

inspiring source materials for paintings. The master’s works on paper vary of course a great deal, from quick ink sketches capturing, almost architecturally, landscapes or groups of figures, to heavily crosshatched, atmospheric etchings. Many works on paper record “simply” what he saw about him, whether models posing in his studio, or the cottages and canals he came across in his Amsterdam neighborhood. Though often barely eight inches across, these drawings can feel monumental, palpably capturing the spreading of a leafy canopy above a cottage, or the almost magisterial rise of a model’s torso.

The drawing styles of Rembrandt’s many students, understandably, tended to closely follow the master’s. Sets of drawings of studio models, and even landscapes, indicate that Rembrandt sometimes worked side by side with his students, and the comparison of the works by master and students is particularly revealing of Rembrandt’s surpassing powers.

As a student at the New York Studio School in the mid-70s, I spent a good many days at the Metropolitan Museum copying various paintings, among them several Rembrandts. I didn’t attempt to duplicate the original paintings, but to track down their mysterious inner energy. The results were indifferent as independent works of art, but they provided crucial lessons of how pictorial forces can gather about a few well-placed notes, with each gambit of color leading to the next.

I’m struck today by how much remains unchanged since Rembrandt’s time. The same sun illuminates houses and roads. Modern humans may be slightly taller on average, but otherwise look largely the same. We absorb all such sights with the same organ, the human eye.

Each of the Rembrandt-inspired paintings in this show depended on many acts of invention. There’s no color of course in the original figure and landscape drawings and prints. The invention of color, however, felt natural to me—no more daunting than the usual challenge of finding equivalents. I surrounded the models with fabrics of likely-enough hues.

In my various versions of “Bastion in Amsterdam,” the foreground became first a verdant green, then somber earth tones. I also greatly enlarged every image, in some cases ten-fold. The hope was to proceed as if standing next to the artist,viewing the scene for myself (and yes, sneaking frequent peeks to see how a master did it). The process was at once humbling and elating.

At a few points, I was startled by how much Rembrandt would leave unstated in his drawings. I had looked at “Reclining Female Nude” scores of times without registering how the figure’s left leg essentially vanished into the background. Similarly, it was only upon attempting to translate “Female Nude, Sitting” into paint that I realized the artist had left the stool hopelessly distorted and the model’s right arm completely unexplained—was it lifted, or folded down across her body? Yet in all such cases Rembrandt’s images remained compellingly real; he clearly knew what was crucial for an overall effect. Such moments also required further inventions on my part. The leg, once colored, couldn’t merge with the background, and its newly defined contours jogged the rhythms throughout.

None of the paintings, of course, compares with the keen articulations and bravura of the original Rembrandts. Rather, they reflect the intentions of the rest of the work in this show: locating, in painting’s unique language of line and color, a deeper characterization of moments of our visual experience.

Rembrandt van Rijn Reclining Female Nude c.1662, reed pen and ink with wash and opaque white, 7½ x 10 in.

After Rembrandt’s drawing “Recling Female Nude” 2023, oil/board, 11 x 17 in.

Rembrandt van Rijn The Bastion in Amsterdam c.1650, charcoal, 6½ x 10¾ in.

After Rembrandt’s drawing “The Bastion in Amsterdam” #1

After Rembrandt’s drawing “The Bastion in Amsterdam” #2

2023, oil/canvas, 20 x 27 in.

2023, oil/canvas, 18 x 24 in.

After Rembrandt’s drawing “The Bastion in Amsterdam” #3 2023, oil/paper, 31 x 51 in.

ABOVE:

Rembrandt van Rijn Female Nude, Sitting c.1656, reed pen and ink wash, 8¾ x 7¼ in.

LEFT:

After Rembrandt’s drawing “ Female Nude, Sitting” 2023, oil/canvas, 36 x 24 in.

John Goodrich is a New York-based painter, teacher, and writer who exhibits at Bowery Gallery in New York City. His paintings have appeared in group shows at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Kouros Gallery and Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York City, the Contemporary Realist Gallery in San Francisco and numerous other venues around the country. His work has been mentioned in reviews in The New York Times, The New York Sun, The New York Observer, The New Haven Register and other publications.

In the past he has taught studio art classes at the National Academy School of Fine Arts, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Long Island University, Western Connecticut State University, and Borough of Manhattan Community College. He currently teaches at Haverford College.

A writer on art, he was a regular contributor to Review magazine, The New York Sun, CityArts, Artcritical.com and Hyperallergic.com

BACK COVER:

Schoodic Trees 2022, oil/paper, 12 x 16 in.