Home is Where the Art is

Joe Goodwin works at home, but he isn’t a telecommuter. The artist spends his days painting in a white-walled, light-filled studio that occupies the entire third floor of his expertly renovated Pittsfield, Massachusetts, home. With sloping ceilings that follow the roofline of the house and a brick chimney at the center of the space, Goodwin’s studio provides rooftop views of the neighborhood and the Berkshire hills in the distance.

“For me, it’s necessary to make art,” Goodwin says. “I’ve always had to do it, to shape my life around it.”

Goodwin’s studio includes several of his quirky collections, from Tibetan prayer flags to tiny, red cowboy boots from his childhood, displayed in a clear plastic case. A wall clock tucked close to the peaked ceiling features birds instead of numerals; on each hour, it plays a different birdsong. “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I come up,” he says. “It’s accessible all the time.”

The result of such accessibility is complex, layered abstract canvases that pulse and glow with color and texture, expressed in Goodwin’s own vocabulary of techniques developed over more than twenty-five years of professional art-making. For Goodwin, painting in the abstract is his way of getting “the essentials on the canvas.” He finds that “places really resonate with me—I come back into the studio and paint them.” That the finished canvases depict dreamlike visions rather than identifiable locations matters, for him, not at all.

A full-time resident of the Berkshires since 2003, Goodwin is very much a part of the arts community, with a Storefront Artist Project residency and several previous Storefront and Ferrin Gallery shows on his résumé—which also includes gallery shows across the United States and abroad and a list of museums and private collections that have purchased his paintings.
Goodwin has been hard at work all summer, creating new pieces for his fall exhibition at the Ferrin Gallery in Pittsfield. Joe Goodwin: A Recent Epoch, a solo show of paintings and monotypes, opens September 17, with a reception at 6, and runs through November 14. [SEPTEMBER 2009]

THE GOODS

Joe Goodwin:
A Recent Epoch
Sept 17 - Nov 14

Ferrin Gallery
437 North St.
Pittsfield, Mass.
413.442.1622
www.ferringallery.com
www.jgoodwinstudio.com