Goodridge Roberts : Pictures at an exhibition / Œuvres en exposition
For Goodridge, the act of painting was an attempt to express the feelings of the moment that surfaced when something or someone awakened a response in him. This was particularly true with his watercolours, since this is a medium where you have no second chance. If you don’t succeed in making the marks on the paper respond to your intentions, you cannot rub them out and start again. Landscapes in particular aroused strong feelings and Goodridge struggled to express these in his work. David Milne expressed it well when he once wrote that:
“I am surprised that watercolour hasn’t been used more by the modernists. It is so direct … so powerful, even brutal, that it would seem an ideal medium … because it is faster and painting is the instantaneous art-in contrast to, say music, where the time element comes in.“
The works in the show represent Goodridges’s watercolour painting over more than 30 years. At the beginning of his career, he painted in watercolour because he could not afford oils. In the process, he came to love the medium but once he was able to afford oils he would leave it for years before coming back to it. Several of the works in the show come from the summer of 1955, when we had rented a cottage at Pointe-au-Baril on Georgian Bay. I remember that he had not worked in watercolour consistently for some time but that summer he worked at it fiercely, sometimes completing two or even three a day.
There were practical considerations as well in his choice of medium. If we were travelling, it was unnecessary to wait days for oils to be sufficiently dry to pack in the car. He did not return to watercolour again to any great extent until the summer of 1962, when we were living at a farm for four or five months at Calumet in the Ottawa Valley. ‘Edge of field” is from this period. I am grateful to Roger and Christian for the chance they have given me to see Goodridge’s work in a new way. Many of these are works I have lived with on the walls of my home. Roger has allowed me to see them anew. I can recall the moments in which they were made – the sun on a hot Georgian Bay day, or the parched fields and hills of the Ottawa Valley.
I am also grateful to Roger and Christian for giving Goodridge the chance to be seen by a new audience. Perhaps it is a bit like what often happens with children and their parents. With growing maturity the realization comes how like our parents we are and how much of this likeness has come from them. I think this exhibit says something about both the continuity and also the maturity of art in Canada when we can feel again a power that endures across the years. Joan Roberts, May 2012
Par la grâce de l’eau
L’art de Goodridge Roberts défie le temps. Autrefois réduits à leur aspect figuratif ou documentaire, ses paysages affirment maintenant leur maturité. Hors des partis-pris de l’automatisme ils se révèlent des transcriptions
sensibles, honnêtes et directes de l’intention de l’artiste: partager dans l’instant le meilleur de son don, une perception immédiate du présent.
Voué à son art, Roberts a réharmonisé des chants de terre et d’eau, de bois et de saisons en tonalités accordées à sa seule intuition.
Ces œuvres en exposition offrent les variations les plus achevées sur son thème de prédilection.
R.B. Mai 2012
Document :
Invitation – Goodridge Roberts
