The Art of Christopher Goedert

Painting

The first three paintings on this page are from a series I am calling Erosion. The series focuses on a rock formation in Indiana's McCormick's Creek State Park that has been and will continue to be sculpted by erosion (primarily water erosion). I enjoyed the visual appearance of the rocks, especially the way the light played on their surfaces. I was also intrigued by the idea that those rocks had been shaped over the course of millennia and that they would continue to change form in subtle ways as time continues.

In terms of technique, I had been reading about 19th century American artists, especially Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, when I started the series. I decided to work with a relatively loose technique reminiscent of those artists as well as William Merritt Chase and Cecilia Beaux. If you view these paintings from a distance, they seem pretty well-defined. As you get closer to the paintings, you will find that they are smooth and well-defined in many places but that they are also loosely brushed in other places. I did not go for bravura brushwork like that of Edouard Manet, John Singer Sargent, or Diego Velazquez, but I did allow myself to put down confident strokes of paint and to leave those strokes alone.

Erosion (Wolf Cave, McCormick's Creek State Park, Indiana). Oil on Canvas. 2018. 16" x 20".

Erosion 2. Oil on Canvas. 2019. 16" x 20".

Erosion 3. Oil on Canvas. 2020. 28" x 40".

This painting is in the private collection of Bob and Kathy Amyot.

For this next painting, I decided to try my hand at Cubism. I chose to work from a still life group which included a guitar, pottery, antlers, and draped towels. (I did a pencil drawing of this same group and you can compare the two pieces if you look at that drawing on my portfolio.) After examining several early Cubist paintings by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, I was inspired to create an image in a similar manner. To start my own Cubist piece, I studied the ins and outs of the still life group and composed a pencil drawing of the group. As I sketched out the group in a fragmented manner, I imagined viewing each of the objects from different perspectives. When I moved onto the painting, I worked from my pencil sketch for the composition but made some subtle adjustments here and there. Like Braque and Picasso, I worked primarily with a neutral ochre color in different values (with a small amount of red in one area). Along with gray, Braque and Picasso worked with a neutral ochre in many of their paintings in order to flatten the image. Even though they worked with different values in their Cubist depictions of still life groups or people, those artists played with the idea of space, simultaneously giving dimension to their subjects while flattening them. Unlike Braque and Picasso, I worked with acrylic paint, a medium that had not yet been created when those artists developed Cubism.