Guy Goodwin, Resident Artist Lecture 1993

In this lecture painter Guy Goodwin shares the evolution of his painting in relation to changes in his life, beginning with works influenced by reproductions of contemporary art encountered in magazines. He discusses his childhood near Birmingham, Alabama, moving to New York as a young adult, meeting other artists and having to admit that he was a painter when confronted with the cliché that painting is dead. He describes a period in his work when he applied paint as thick as nine or ten inches on the surface of the canvas and the technical and conservation issues it posed. Goodwin also describes his rediscovery of the work of Arshile Gorky, whom he had admired early in his career, with the ultimate result that he labored to break down the surface, the opaqueness and the density of his paintings and began to experiment with different ways of painting and drawing.