Brenda Goodman at John Davis Gallery, Hudson

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Because of the recent debacle wrapped in a fiasco enveloped in a brouhaha, my blogging schedule—to say nothing of my studio time—has been compromised. But art marches on. For this blog post it’s going it’s going to march backward a couple of weeks to my visit to Hudson, New York.
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The John Davis Gallery on Warren Street in Hudson
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Set alongside the river about two hours up the New York Thruway, Hudson is a small town that seems to have been revitalized by the galleries and antique shops that line Warren Street, its main drag.
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Of the half dozen or so good galleries, the best by far is the John Davis Gallery, a small-town space with a New York sensibility. And I mean that as a compliment. The storefront gallery, with light pouring in around the exhibition walls which block the front windows, was showing Brenda Goodman’s powerful work, a selection of 20 years of paintings, mostly, and some work on paper. Davis himself was behind the desk, a slight figure radiating huge enthusiasm for the art that filled his space. .
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In the front corner of the gallery, large and small. The large painting, right, is Crossing Over, 2009, oil on wood, 60 x 64 inches

I don’t know Brenda Goodman, but looking at her work with its robust, if slightly menacing forms, I see life crammed with energy and emotion. There’s pain there. Joy, too. And those passages of thick impasto—so beautiful, so messy—pull you close to the surface and then push you away, then pull you right in only to repel you once again. Viewing those paintings was a physical and emotional workout.
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Formally Goodman is painting large areas against small passages, thick against thin, small figures against hulking abstract forms, raw emotion against the sheer material sensuality of the paint. Technically she’s a master. If I were to be flip, I would characterize her work as the lovechild of Philip Guston and Joan Mitchell on a bad day, no a good day, no a bad day, no a good day, but the fact is that Goodman is a singular painter doing brute and beautiful work. Her paintings in fact look like no one’s but her own.
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Left, Hard Choice, 2010, oil on wood, 60 x 64 inches; right, Burial, 2010, oil on wood, 52 x 56 inches

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Be sure to see the full view of Burial on the gallery's website. I find it immensely moving, suggestive of ancestral remains and recent loss. A scar carved into the surface seems new, raw, but perhaps it's an old wound reopened. The paint Goodman used to render the flat, map-like shape is probably iron oxide, the same mineral as earth and blood.

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Two details of Burial, below
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Above, Loss, 2009, oil on wood, 60 x 60 inches

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Detail below
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Goodman's show is over (it ran July 22-August 16), but you can see more of her work on the gallery blog, as well as Goodman’s own website and blog. There's a recent review by Eric Gelber at Art Critical. Keep her on your radar. Get to her next show.

Next post I’ll take you on a tour of the gallery’s Carriage House, an old building behind the storefront spce that’s filled with great art and all kinds of architectural fabulosity.

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