Catherine Goodman: Worlds Within
Exhibition preview
CATHERINE Goodman: Worlds Within will be on display at Marlborough Fine Art from September 12 to October 6, 2012.
Goodman is the co-founder and Artistic Director of The Prince’s Drawing School and drawing is at the centre of this exhibition. The accompanying catalogue includes essays by critic Rachel Campbell Johnston and art historian Duncan Robinson.
Worlds Within are paintings of the inner landscape. They are the result of twenty-five years of working in the Indian Himalayas and are a dialogue between Indian and London, the artist’s home. They combine paintings of mountains and huts with interiors of her family home and studio.
Also showing will be drawings made after paintings by Rembrandt and Veronese in the National Gallery which record her intimate familiarity with these artists.
The scale of the mountainous landscape with its massive peaks impacts on works which dwarf the artist and finds a counterpoint in the intimate drawings from the old masters. Goodman draws every day and this activity is at the centre of everything she does.
Neither subject is a simple rendition but permeated by her emotion, memories and feelings of the subject. Goodman says of her drawings: “They hold smell, temperature, atmosphere” and have to be used “while there’s a freshness in them which after a time dies”. Bold strokes and colour convey the immediacy of her original encounter with the subject.
As Rachel Campbell Johnston writes:
“From a distance you see a picture. But step closer and it disappears into a dense network of bush-strokes. The image melts into a forest of swipes and dribbles and splotches. Paint loops and spirals and eddies and sloshes. It is as if the world has dissolved back into that mysterious swell of feelings with which it was first sensed. Step back a few paces and it slowly resolves again – though perhaps not into quite the same picture that you saw the first time.”
Catherine Goodman was born in 1961. She lives and works in London and has exhibited at Marlborough Fine Art in 2004 (with David Dawson) and 2008.
Times: Monday to Friday: 10am – 5.30pm; Saturday: 10am – 12.30pm (closed Saturdays during August).
Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BY
Tel: +44 (0)20 7629 5161
Website: www.marlboroughfineart.com/