On Paper: The Gift of Ann and Don McPhail

Page 97

Woodmere. This particular print, once

association. That may be part of what

you see it in the flesh, grabs you and

makes it an image that you don’t forget.

doesn’t let go.

PP: It’s beautifully composed as well, with

WV: I’m very happy that we’re starting

that huge white image on one side and

to have a critical mass of her work so we

the dark image on the other. It wouldn’t

can represent her story as an artist.

have been the same if she centralized the large image of the petal.

AM: Her ideas are quite deep.

WV: We’re planning to hang the

WV: What was she like as a person?

Enid Mark print near your beautiful

DM: Oh, modest, friendly, very amiable.

photograph by Ray Metzker, this wooded

Modest meaning that she was not

scene, and Eileen Goodman’s gigantic

flamboyant by any stretch of the

watercolor of yellow peonies.

imagination.

AM: Talk about handling a watercolor!

AM: I remember that she often worked

Eileen’s enormous flowers are just

small. She began to get into some books.

fabulous—some of the great works of art

She was a graduate of Smith College,

of Philadelphia.

and they have a number of things of

WV: I don’t know how, but Eileen gets

hers at their museum. She was a very

a unique dramatic intensity out of her

deep thinker—the way she talked about

watercolors. We can see it here in the

art—and she really analyzed particular

deep pools of blues and greens.

subjects in her work.

AM: Watercolor, to my way of thinking,

DM: I never noticed it before, but looking

is such a difficult medium. Eileen has an

at that picture it could very well be not a

enormous capacity for being absolutely

flower but a figure.

elegant with it. We saw an early one of hers at Locks Gallery—the first of

AM: A woman’s back?

her works that I ever saw—and I said WV: The sensuality of natural forms

to Marian, I’m going to take that. It was

stretches into many domains of 95


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