ARTIST’S STATEMENT
‘Every Mark is a Decision’
As an Artist I am viscerally aware of the straight-line connection between me and the Artists who made their Marks with such verve on the walls of the Chauvet Caves approximately 35,000 years ago. We don't know their names, sex or motivations but the drive and passion to make Marks is a primitive and inescapable human need and this straight-line connection between Artists across millennia will never be broken. Being part of a link in this past and future chain is fundamental to my life as an Artist.
My father was passionately interested in sculpture and paintings andI will always be grateful to him for teaching me how to look at art in great detail and it has informed how I work as there is a great deal more to artistic creation than the making of marks. Looking is incredibly important. People always ask how long it takes to make a piece and the first answer is ‘a lifetime’ and the next answer varies from work to work. As an example of this process of looking, there was a painting I was pleased with but knew something was wrong. I put it on a spare easel in my studio and kept glancing at it and 8 months later I realised that I didn’t need to add to it: it needed to have something removed. I grabbed a palette knife, removed the ‘offending’ marks and the painting was finished! Proof to me at least that painting involves a lot of looking, not always doing.
I’m particularly interested in the Japanese concept of ‘Ma’ which I understand is to do with absence of activity so for example in music it is the silence between the sounds, in painting it’s the unfilled space that leaves the viewer able to use their own imagination. To me the negative space is as important as the positive space and in my paintings and drawings every mark is a decision and every decision to not make a mark is absolutely critical to the final piece.
Rosemary Goodenough, Norfolk
TWO REVIEWS OF ROSEMARY GOODENOUGH’S EXHIBITION AT GALLERY EAST, WOODBRIDGE, SUFFOLK. 21 MAY - 2 JULY 2022:
“Et in Arcadia Ego” A Personal Appreciation.
Rosemary Goodenough’s new work is inspired by nature.
She paints the trees and flowers, the oceans and mountain lakes that she so obviously loves in the hope, I suspect, that we will feel the same sense of wonder and delight in the natural world as she does.
But she does not try to achieve this by describing, in paint, the colour and texture of the branch of a tree or the intricate detail of a flower in bloom. You will not recognise the familiar profile of a mountainous skyline as none of these things are her concern.
These paintings do not record physical or topographical details. They express, to more profound effect, the constantly changing feelings and sensations we experience when immersed in nature. When she paints trees, we can believe that we hear the wind rustling in their leaves. When she paints a flower, we know instinctively that its scent is intoxicating. We can almost breathe the cool mountain air. The artist is engaging not just our visual, but our full range of sensory perception.
There is a lyrical quality to her work, which hovers somewhere between abstraction and impressionism. At one moment, as the titles of her works reveal, she is calling up the sound and feel of soft rain, the next a cool breeze and then, perhaps, the changing light. These are the things that stimulate our memories of the places we have loved long after the visual detail is forgotten. The images, just as our recollections, are indistinct.
But there is also a tension in what might otherwise be mistaken for mere sentimentality. There is a dark and mysterious quality to these paintings and, if there is a gentle hint of sadness too, it is only the yearning for something lost but fondly remembered.
I wonder whether these evaporating images might also be alluding to the gradual degradation of the world they describe through climate change? Even if unintended, the point is quietly but powerfully made by simply reminding us of the fading glories of nature that might one day be lost for ever.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Rosemary Goodenough is not only a painter but also a sculptor, a fashion designer and a writer of books for children, that most discerning of readerships. As anyone who has read a story to a child will know, carefully chosen words can transport the childish imagination into a world of enchantment that reality can never match. These paintings are just as carefully crafted, sometimes with a knife, a cloth or even her hands to achieve precisely the same effect.
If you prefer to look at them for their simple beauty alone, you will be just as generously rewarded.
Christopher Penn 2022
Private Art Consultant.
‘Two Ways of Seeing’
This exhibition features recent work by artists Jules George from Suffolk and Rosemary Goodenough from Norfolk, bringing together two distinct approaches to the landscape. The title of the exhibition, suggested by Rosemary Goodenough, draws on the influential 1972 television series and subsequent book by John Berger, Ways of Seeing, which explored the ways in which ‘every image embodies a way of seeing’ and how we look and express what we see reveals something of significance about us.
Rosemary Goodenough has been an artist for over 50 years - self-taught, she cannot remember a time when she did not draw or paint. She now works exclusively in her studio in Norfolk, painting directly to the board or panel without prior sketches or studies, taking pleasure in the colour, sweep and slide of her medium. There is never a plan or clear intention, works are painted in the moment, entirely of her imagination, the life of her mind reflected in echoes of the world – finding form in landscapes and seascapes, trees and flowers.
Moments of representation - a copse of trees or fallen petals from a flower – conjure places remembered or convey the beauty of both life and decay. Perhaps even more evocative is the artist’s construction of space within her paintings. Deepest pools of colour are brought to the surface with impasto that is applied with hands and palette knives. Thinner veils of colour are applied with a cloth, the different areas of the painting worked with the corresponding hand, Goodenough is entirely ambidextrous. Remarkably, Goodenough is also synaesthetic - a linking of sight and sound which means that colours and form have equivalence to music, allowing her to orchestrate her palette. Single works explore the full range of a pigment - in its most translucent application ‘sap green’ glows almost with palest yellow and at its most intense forms a dense emerald black. This grand chromatic scale sings on the board.
Some of these most recent works have been years in mind before being realised on the board. The other-worldly Moonfleet was 8 years in process. Sea Fever was inspired by the John Masefield poem - I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky … The ethereal forms sail in an unknown sea, in transit from one world to another, capturing in their sails not only the motion of wind and water but a sense of memory, loss and longing.
Amanda Geitner 2022
Director, East Anglia Art Fund.