| Exhibition Reviews:
Margot McWilliams
Casco Bay Weekly
July 25, 1991
"This is a rave review. Perhaps because beauty is elevating. Or because the dreamlike, folkloric paintings of Chagall have always filled me with a sense of wonder. Or because the intricately decorated swaths of color in the paintings of Matisse sweep my sleepy consciousness to unaccustomed levels of lyric awareness. Perhaps it's because paul Klee loved children's art, and did wonderful naive paintings, including one of a simple boat in a harbor that he painted a crazy yellow. Or because Picasso filled entire planes with wallpaper patterns in the midst of a revolutionary painting ("Guernica"), and I felt a sense of optimism. these Expressionist and Post Expressionist painters used color and pattern in a way that celebrated the rhythms of nature, landscapes, cities and people. They awaken primitive emotions -- certain yearnings from a place of innocence.
I feel all of this looking at the paintings of Alison Goodwin. Her paintings, which are of people, towns and cities, flowers and the interiors of friends' houses, are abstract and figurative works on richly decorated one-dimensional planes. They're playful, humorous, and filled with a pervasive happiness. They're beautiful, ornamental canvases of intense colors that are made to glitter by the superimposition of metallic gold paint. They're the Arabian Nights.
Goodwin says in her statement about her painting that her recent work is a revival of voyages "across the park, across the country, across the ocean." It would seem that her voyages took her into the company of the paintings of the contemporary German painter Hundertwasser, whose water-based paintings, though more abstract and less figurative than Goodwin's, are also playful, one-dimensional landscapes, with a similar rich palette and use of ornamental gold leaf. The tree then branches from Hundertwasser to Gustav Klimt, in whose painting "The Kiss" the lovers are painted figuratively, but the quilt that wraps around them is built and constructed by pigments and metallic paints, much as a real quilt is constructed.
Goodwin's paintings combine all of these qualities with a style also drawn from cubism, primitivism and folk art. With this combination, she creates paintings that are highly ornate and exotic. One, with a domesticated, neighborly title of "Mary Lou's House," feels more like a Moroccan tapestry than a local domestic scene, evoking a dwelling place from a much more exotic corner of the world than Mary Lou's house probably is. The floor is a black and white checkerboard on an almost vertical plane. On the right is what must be a bathroom, but which, with its persian tiled floor and a pedestal sink, looks as though it escaped from the a 15th century Middle Eastern painting. The arched window on the left with the suggested form of a black cat bounding out also adds to the exotic feeling. It's a rich, mysterious painting that suggests travels to the world's farthest corners.
Similarly, Goodwin's transformation of the familiar into the exotic is wonderful in her rich tapestry of a painting, "Hallowell." In reality a small and prosaic New England town, it becomes a Russian village comprised of what looks like a series of icons, with gold leaf arches beneath the roofs. The houses, clustered together, are on a descending plane, and have a magical fairy-tale quality, as though they were part of a scene from "The Snow Princess."
Goodwin's sense of humor expresses itself with a delicate childlikeness. "Biddeford Pool," a painting of the place that her family visited when she was a child, is a perfect rendition of a child's conception of a place and what its name might mean. The painting has, as its center, a giant blue circle around the lower rim of which are little houses, all jammed together on the edge of the pool. behind the houses is a large black streak that, in the lower let, goes off into different junctures. On this black strip are hundreds of little blue squares rushing about -- cars on the highway to Boston. The painting is a kid's map of Biddeford pool: the predominance of this giant pool, and its enormous importance at the center of the painting, is exactly the world through a child's eyes.
Goodwin simplifies the elements of the landscape, placing them on planes so that they begin to totter off in tilted directions. She divides her canvases into geometric elements, and then decorates them fully with repeated motifs of spirals and rectangles. The business and life of her scenes are suggested by moving shapes and surges of paint. She saturates the whole with colors that play vibrantly with each other. The result is a lyrical intense nexus of lines and color that create a joyful, festive world."
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Marc Awodey
Seven Days (Burlington, VT)
May 14,2003
Serigraphs can be divided into two classes, most easily described as: the good kind and the bad kind. The former are limited-edition silkscreens produced in the tradition of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. The arty term “serigraph” was invented in the late 1930s by Carl Zigrosser, curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The root word sericos is Greek for “silk,” and graphos means writing. Zigrosser applied his new word to artist-designed, artist-produced, archival-quality silkscreens.
The bad kind of serigraphs? Indus-trially produced copies of famous paintings cranked out by the thousands.
Alison Goodwin’s serigraphs are the good kind. The 14 works in her exhibition, currently hanging in the Governor’s Corridor in Montpelier, are technically descended from the great Pop Art silkscreens of the 1960s. But Goodwin’s are much more complex. Unlike the typical Warhol silkscreens, which have just a few colors, hers have dozens. Goodwin’s prints also have an array of visual textures, rather than the flatness of Pop.
“Upstairs” is a basic still life of flowers and fruit on a table, but Goodwin’s consistently simple compositions are enlivened by extremely sophisticated chromatic choices. Three different greens, printed over a crimson red, produce a floral pattern on the tablecloth. Red outlines remain around the green flowers, and that use of complementary colors brightens the entire scene.
Likewise, there are five purple plums on the table and purple tiles in the checkerboard pattern of the floor, complemented by yellow pears and yellow-and-gold wallpaper. The chairs around the table are blue, but Good-win deftly avoids using more than trace amounts of orange, blue’s complementary hue. To include more would have sapped the zing from her other harmonies.
It should also be noted that none of Goodwin’s colors are covered by just one adjective. The plums in “Upstairs” aren’t just “purple,” but violet, mauve, lilac, damson and just about any other variety of purple Roget’s Thesaurus has to offer.
Goodwin uses the formula of three primaries and only two secondaries over and over again. The still-life “Poppies” portrays red flowers on a table and a blue chair. A second chair is upholstered in orange and light blue. Green appears in background trees seen through two windows, and the white tablecloth has yellow and orange highlights. Purple is the missing secondary color in “Pop-pies.” Goodwin also uses cool browns, however, as well as black and white to add movement to the composition.
Goodwin claims to work “in a Fauvist style,” and that is supported by her use of color. Also, she distorts space in a manner reminiscent of interiors by Matisse — the best-known Fauve. Decorative wallpaper patterns in “Poppies,” “Upstairs” and the vertical piece “Olives” are extremely similar to Matisse wallpaper motifs.
But “Olives” reveals the problem with being derivative. The foreground table is, by comparison, less graceful than the wallpaper. If a Matisse-like approach to ornamentation is to fully succeed, redundantly curvy shapes need to be contrasted by greater angularity in the forms.
Goodwin’s cityscapes are much more stylized than those of the original Fauves, and much more decorative. She has no need for the angst of Vlaminck or the precision of Derain. “High Street,” which refers to the San Francisco thoroughfare by that name, is a surrealistically steep city block whimsically crammed with narrow buildings. The piece measures approximately 28-by-20 inches and shows a red road curving toward the upper right, yellow houses packed tight as teeth, green trees with swirling foliage and electric-blue lawns. The buildings have purple highlights and a sparing use of lime green.
Goodwin’s serigraphs are highly illustrative and technically outstanding examples of the medium. They are also much more colorful than Governor Douglas.
Philip Isaacson
Maine Sunday Telegram
August 1996
"Fruits of Life" features paintings by Alison Goodwin (Portland and Montpelier, VT) at the Greenhut Galleries in Portland. The work has an idiosyncratic quality that gives it stamina. There is a healthy measure of durability behind its initial -- and very obvious -- graphic impact.
The paintings flirt with the decorative and with the School of Paris stylishness, but they do so in a way that strikes me as personal to the artist and as ingratiating.
Perhaps Goodwin could best be described as a synthesist. This is not a pejorative suggestion. She draws upon a catalog of visual thoughts that matured in the first part of this century and recasts them in a personal matter.
The essential subject matter is classical. It is the manipulation that gives them their personality and thus, their durability.
Views of interiors have impossibly angled walls. Floors slope precariously. Windows give out to tilted landscapes and patterns shout furiously at one another.
Goodwin truncates her compositions, slicing off chunks of things at will, and ignores normal thoughts about perspective. Here then is idiosyncrasy emerging from synthesis.
It's a difficult thing to do, and this painter does it very well."
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