Godman.

Tag: Painting

  • Bushwick Open Studios

    Bushwick Open Studios

    Today I was featured on the Arts In Bushwick blog for Bushwick Open Studios, which I am participating in this year for two days in what I’m calling Metaphysical Delight. Come on by my studio if you’d like Friday or Saturday. Info here.

    Below are the questions I answered for them, but also check it out on their site.

    AIB: What are five hashtags that describe your work?
    JG: #abstract #transformation #decay #life #jamesgodman

    AIB: What is your artist origin story?
    JG: My art practice started with me as a teen, airbrushing t-shirts in a local mall down the street from my high school in Evanston, Illinois, where people from all walks of life would bring me photographs to reproduce by hand on various apparel. Looking back now, its quite clear that this careful study of photographic images led me to fall in love with photography and use it extensively in my work.

    AIB: What is your favorite medium right now and why do you love it?
    JG: After much experimentation and work, I’m happy with the processes I use to create my work.

    AIB: What is on the horizon for your work in the next year?
    JG: In the coming year, I will be furiously creating work and sharing it with a wider audience.

    AIB: How has being in Bushwick influenced your work?
    JG: Bushwick is an amazing place to live and work. I see and interact with vernacular architecture, surfaces, and people that work their way into my work one way or another. The surrounding sounds also contribute.

    AIB: What Bushwick artists do you admire and why?
    JG: I admire all Bushwick residents and world residents that are doing their thing, working hard, and helping others.

    AIB: Tell us your most memorable exchange during Bushwick Open Studios.
    JG: Me: Tell me more about this piece. Fellow artist whose name I’ve forgotten: Thats life itself.

    AIB: If a movie is made about your life, who would play you?
    JG: A phytoplankton.

    AIB: If you could have dinner with anyone living or dead, who would it be and why?
    JG: My Mother, because she is the best.

    AIB: What is the future New York Times headline about you?
    JG: James Godman, dead at 107 years old.

    AIB: Was there something you want to share that was not asked?
    JG: Thanks for supporting artists in our community and beyond!

  • New York Stories

    New York Stories

    This morning I was cleaning up my digital desktop and came across this picture of my friend and fellow artist Victor Matthews which I made back in late March of 2013 as he was preparing for the Venice Biennale.

    I’m recalling the evening with a smile as I type this. We had planned to make a couple of quick photographs and then head out for a beer. Just as I’m wrapping things up, in walks Salman Rushdie, and Victor greets him with a hug and introduces me. After a pleasant discussion about art, smart phones, and a few other things, Salman proceeded to give me a synopsis of what he had just written about Victor’s work:

    The white paintings of Victor Matthews, instantly recognizable, and like no other work on the contemporary American scene, are ludic, affectionate dreams of New York, like portraits of an all-white Oz, with a white brick road (Broadway) snaking through a white metropolis that might, if you looked at it through green glasses, look almost like an emerald city. Matthews’ New York has its own intimate iconography. Yes, the city’s tall buildings and great bridges show up, watched over by a benignly radiant white sun, but a smaller, more everyday, human-scale world, made up of hydrants, bicycles, water towers, and sneakers maybe the sneakers above all else is where the heart and wit of the works is really located. (The often skanky pigeons of Manhattan are transformed, naturally, into white doves.) Orchestrating and organizing these images, so that they seem to grow in and out of one another, is Matthew’s wonderfully supple, metamorphic sense of line, a dancing, fluid entity whose movement is dictated by pure instinct, by the moment of contact between artist and canvas. Matthews trusts his line, and the decisive moments that make it stretch, curl, zag and flow. Like a jazzman making rhapsodies in white, he follows where the music leads. For this Venice show, he has broken new ground, finding a way of pushing his white city into three dimensions. These new sculptures exist in the same world as the paintings, but are somehow even more mischievous. Those upturned sneakers atop these piled-up mountain-cities make you smile, but they also celebrate the primacy of the quotidian over the lite: the victory of the city street, and of the New Yorkers who walk it. Salman Rushdie New York City Spring March 29th, 2013

    The three of us then proceeded to a nearby watering hole where we talked more about art and relationships, and shared whiskey and laughs.

    Below is a film I made about Victor and his work.