Over the course of a seven-decade profession, the one fixed in Brenda Goodman’s apply has been drawing. The fluidity of her line parallels her thought course of and openness to taking surprising paths, usually prompted by a reminiscence or life occasion. In 2020, she instructed Readability Haynes in a BOMB journal interview that her work is about “ache and unhappiness,” including that “every thing I’m at seventy-six years previous is within the work, and though they’re not gut-wrenching, they’re nonetheless me, and all my life experiences are in them.” Alongside, and generally in tandem with, her work, Goodman has made nuanced portraits of her pets in addition to line drawings which might be in dialog with Alfred Kubin’s macabre topics.
Usually small, these works continued to increase within the thoughts of this viewer lengthy after seeing them. Paul Klee famously described his course of as “taking a line for a stroll.” In counterpoint to his assertion of authorial management, I wish to counsel that Goodman’s line takes her to locations the place trauma and therapeutic, grief and luxury coexist. Taking a look at her graphic work — spanning from her years as a precocious scholar in Detroit within the Sixties to the current, after I lately visited her studio — it appeared apparent to me {that a} museum ought to commit an exhibition to her drawings, accompanied by a considerable publication.
Throughout my studio go to, Goodman, who was making ready for knee-replacement surgical procedure, confirmed me a collection of 24 drawings in coloured pencil, graphite, watercolor, and different media. (She has since added to the suite.) Reminiscence, creativeness, and desires all play a component in these moody works, which jogged my memory of a stage set combining totally different points of her lexicon, from bereft figures and claustrophobic interiors to geometric and biomorphic abstraction. They appear to inform a narrative, however one that may solely be accomplished by the viewer.
A number of figures inhabit some drawings; when two are current, they exist in isolation from one another. The summary kind evokes a physique in others. In a single melancholy drawing, a reddish slit punctures a black boulder-like kind rendered in graphite, and surrounded by spiky branches, veins, or fissures, suggesting a tormented physique. In one other, a unadorned human determine sits in a chair, hunched, trying downward, within the decrease right-hand nook; in entrance of the determine is a big rectangle which may characterize a clean canvas, whereas behind, hidden beneath what might be an unrolled canvas, is a row of heads with eyes peering out at us. The remainder of the drawing is consumed by the vacancy of the room. Within the far left edge, a slender yellow rectangle interrupts the grey and reddish-brown palette and echoes the strip of yellow on the primary drawing’s left edge. Are they indicators of sunshine on this grey, gloomy world or of false hope?
A distinct drawing exhibits two cylindrical heads tilting towards one another on a crimson and black area. The heads are featureless besides for his or her open mouths and sharp tooth. Is the black cylindrical form on left a figural presence, or perhaps even a doppelganger? What do these lingam-like types signify? Goodman has conjured up a world whose figures communicate a language rife with feeling, but we can’t translate it into something literal.
Typically the shapes characterize a home or the stacked logs of a stockade. In a single work, blood drips from between the logs, stacked vertically on a crimson floor like a piece of a fort wall. A shorn log rises diagonally from the decrease left edge, pierced close to the highest by a stick from which a torn white flag with pale crimson stains hangs limply. What does this website demarcate? Did a battle happen right here? Why is it deserted? I really feel it could be a disservice to those drawings to try to reply these questions. They invite us in, however stay simply past comprehension; explaining them trivializes them. A wave of inconsolable grief animates these haunted artworks. There aren’t any indicators of purpose or justice to be present in Goodman’s bleak world. The figures and scenes are testaments to survival, however the associated fee is evident.
