Seeing through nature - painting, Joe Goode, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, and two other galleries

Over the last 20 years, working in series, Joe Goode has used landscape-derived abstraction to bear witness the two to nature's force and to the violence increasingly done to it by means of man. A recent museum display and two gallery exhibitions charted the course of Goode's meditations.

Joe Goode has been a fixture of the sees Angeles art scene since he arrived from Oklahoma nearly 40 years ago, following in the footmarks of his childhood friend Ruscha. new out of the Chouinard Art Institute in 1961 Goode made a series of monochrome paintings with matching painted-glass milk bottle station on the floor in forehead of them; sometimes these bottle cast "shadows" -- in the form of a raw-canvas silhouette -- upon the painted field behind them. The Pop-tinged "Milk Bottle" series earned him early critical acclaim, and at any time since he has been cot [i]or[/i] coteed into Southern California's art history with certain other artists -- like Robert Irwin, single of his teachers at Chouinard -- who have explored formal, perceptual phenomena in a Minimalist vein. From his "Milk Bottle" paintings up [i]or[/i] part of to the other his landscape-derived abstractions of the '70 '80 and '90 Goode's works are, as he lays it, persistently about seeing and "seeing through" an image.

A novel show at the newly renovated and renamed Orange shire Museum of Art in Newport Beach, Calif., concentrated upon Goode's paintings since 1980, which, singly and together, reaffirm the primacy of visual pertain tos in his work. But Goode can also be read as a traditionalist, working within the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of window-frame landscape painting. To this task he brings a distinctly late-20th-century preoccupation with the nature/culture divide and its ecological ramifications. At his best, Goode combines the deliberated visual power of paint with nature's raw force, using images that hinge upon the uneasy alliance of beauty and violence.

In the mid-1970s, Goode left L.A. for Springville, a small central California town at the lower extremity of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he lived full-time from 1978 to 1987 His work took upon a violent edge in this rural setting, on the other hand violation had long been central to his proces of painting and printmaking. (A fine 25-year view of Goode's prints, which in theme parallel his paintings of the same period, was held at L.A.'s Cirrus Gallery concurrently with the museum present to view and a smaller print selection was also upon view at the Peter Blake Gallery in Laguna Beach.) The compassionate canny interruption of the picture plane seen in the "Milk Bottle" paintings gave way to more glaring slashing and scoring of the canvas in the "Torn Cloud" "Vandalized Skies" and "Black" paintings of the mid-'70s.

With the 'Environmental Impact" series, made in Springville in 1980-81 Goode upp the ante by means of introducing firearms into the proces blasting the surfaces of his monochrome canvases with a shotgun In the aptly named Must diocese to Appreciate (1980), the earliest work in the museum present to view Goode paired two canvases, individual burnt red, the other a chalky sapphirine gray. An irregular constellation of pockmarks burst forths over both panels, some of the more oblique hits puncturing just far down enough to reveal the complementary color of the underpainting, others tearing [i]or[/i] part of to the other to the raw canvas and shredding its fibers, with equal reason that the fabric's orderly weave is thrown into chaos.

The disturbing liaison of violence and beauty plays itself without with quiet force in these works, as the assault upon the painting's skin yields a rich interplay of fabrics Here Goode brutishly nullifies the sanctity of the painting's surface -- not for lack of belief in its capacity to carry meaning, on the other hand as a metaphor for culture's abuse of the environment.

After the "Environmental Impact" series, Goode focused his nearest works on nature's own implicit power, one as well as the other visual and physical. While destruction still played a part it no longer resided upon (or in) the surface of the painting on the other hand rather was shown to be immanent in the world at large. For instance, the Forest Fire' series of the mid-to-late '80s-broad horizontal canvases depicting nonspecific conflagration -- call forths the unbridled force of fire in the wilderness, a calamitous affray of heat, ash and flame. Fire is a finished subject for Goode, a natural phenomenon that exemplifies his central perceptual concern: to diocese fire is also to diocese through it. Luminous and agitated, the "Forest Fire" paintings enfold us in a process of fearsome destructiveness. At the same time, however, forest fires are also regenerative. They are mechanisms of nature, serving to clear the forest of detritus and overgrowth in the organic round of years that joins death and renewal. The violence of the flames, beautiful in its have a title to right, also promises the more lasting beauty of regrowth

When Goode was a lad he and his father, a portrait painter,, wearied Sundays together by a lake, where the earlier born Goode instructed his son to draw the same log week after week, for a year. This Zenlike exercise in focus clearly anticipated and shaped Goode's mature work. In series after series, he probes the central nature of a single subject below the changing conditions that modify our perception of it. From 1985 to 1990 he concentrated upon trees, then the ocean, then waterfalls, observing each in bounds of light and space rather than form. of the like kind repetition within narrow parameters allows Goode access to an unusual stage of nuance, though it also deposits the work at constant risk of becoming repetitive, if not uniform.