Janis Goodman

Cross Currents

Exhibition May 9-June 6, 2008
Opening Reception – May 9, 2008, 6:30 - 9PM

REYES + DAVIS presents new paintings and drawings by Janis Goodman. Janis, who has exhibited nationally and internationally, is a full professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, a member of the Working Men’s Collective, and Arts Reviewer at PBS/WETA, Around Town Channel 26. Her work is in private collections and museums worldwide. She was born and raised in New York City, now resides in Capital Hill, and maintains a painting studio in Mt. Rainer, Maryland.

For the last several years, Janis Goodman has sought her inspiration in nature, particularly in the woods, along the rivers, and by the sea. Fluctuating light, though the atmosphere and on the water, and constant movement, caused by wind and other forces, have captured her imagination.

In this series of art work, Janis approaches the problem of representing such ungraspable subjects as a breeze over grass, reflections on water, and wind through branches, sometimes working with paint on board, sometimes incorporating wax into her medium, and sometimes by making graphic marks on paper. She fixes the unfixable, transforming light and motion in nature into physical form, and conveying the sense and rhythms of time by their absence.

Between a series of paintings exploring the moment and her most recent works, Janis drew in black and white on paper almost exclusively.  Some of the drawings were sober, deliberate, and decorous. Others were lively, with commas, swoops, and crescents dancing exuberantly across the surface of the paper. These drawings had an impact on the recent paintings and drawings featured in this show. As Janis prepared paintings for this series, she discovered that the drawings had triggered something that was significantly changing her work. Over broad swaths of layered paint, Janis recreated some the undulating strokes and curving marks she had been experimenting with in her drawings, often in bold, saturated colors that hovered over a more subtle background.  

Suddenly and accidentally, the quality of time represented in her work changed; no longer frozen in a single moment, time was liberated and elapses before our eyes. This work celebrates this discovery: a way to represent the passage of time.

Laura Coyle, Independent Curator

Drawing & Painting with Lucretius:
Janis Goodman’s “Cross Currents” at REYES + DAVIS

What is it about the depiction of ‘unsettled states’ that gives us comfort, solace, and often pleasure? Where are we? Where are we going? When are we? When are we leaving?  We usually want to know the answers to these questions, but not knowing has its advantages. Janis Goodman’s work offers no answers, but what it does offer is perhaps more valuable, a deep acceptance of the questions in their unanswerability. Her recent paintings and drawings in Cross Currents, a new exhibition of her work at REYES + DAVIS, can be read as abstractions from nature as well as depictions of nature. In fact, it’s the hovering between the two that gives her work a strange sense of ‘frenetic calm.’  Even though the marks and colors are fixed, they refuse to remain static. “Look again, see again, think again,” is what they ask. The marks themselves—the heavy black marks—have they been ‘set down’ on the surface or are they ‘flying free’ from the surface? The ripples in the water? What causes them? Where is the bottom? Is the water itself floating in the air? Look again. Water is slippery, so is air. So are we.

The Roman poet and natural philosopher Lucretius (99-55 BCE) believed that everything is in flux all the time and that stasis is an illusion. You can’t dip your foot in the same river twice because the river is never the same; different water atoms pass through it every moment. Janis Goodman’s work in Cross Currents graphically embodies this Lucretian idea. The agitated surfaces of her paintings and drawings give way to hinted patterns, and the eye of the viewer gives way to the mind of the viewer. Then everything flips back, and flips again, an oscillation of seeing and thinking. Goodman embraces these seeming contradictions; her painting “describes and well as suggests change, constancy, and rhythm.” This is the nature of things; Janis Goodman’s work in Cross Currents makes it possible for us to perceive it as such.  

Casey Smith