Trucker’s art transports at S.F. gallery
Brett Goodroad makes his living driving trucks around the Southwest for an organic vegetable distributor, but you would never guess it if you looked at his paintings. Neither purely figurative, nor simply abstract, his canvases are a visual catalog of painting techniques: scumbling, impasto, underpainting — all are here for the careful viewer to identify.
The San Francisco artist has discussed his painting as a practice in solving the space of the canvas, an exercise more in composition than conveying meaning. And indeed, as in the group of paintings on view through Saturday, Aug. 14, at Cushion Works, Goodroad’s artworks resist any connection to a social or political reality. Instead, he offers a chance for viewers to revel in the richness of his palette, to submerge themselves in beauty and disconnect from the turmoil of the world outside the painting.
The exhibition starts softly with a pair of paintings on the first wall in the main gallery. In “Untitled (Little Blue)” a field of cerulean thickly applied in the lower third of the painting punctuates a canvas dominated by musty peach, brown and gray. A face in profile, almost diving into the bright blue, tries to come into focus, but
Goodroad deliberately leaves the details ambiguous.
Adjacent is “Untitled (Window).” Here, we peer through a window to another obscured figure at a counter. A piercing yellow in the foreground contrasts the murky top third of the canvas, drawing our attention away from the form, and creating a disorienting flatness in perspective. Goodroad’s use of color — the brilliant azure of “Little Blue’' and perky sunshiny yellow in “Window”— is a tactful upset in the balance of the painting that demonstrates the artist’s interest in the drama evoked by layering and abutting radically different hues in the same canvas.
When Goodroad cannot achieve the effects he wants through the application of paint, he turns to his substrate. In paintings on silk over
linen, the smooth, felted quality of the surface lends softness to the fleshy, bodily forms in works like “Untitled (Portrait)” (2020) and “Untitled (Perineal)” (2021). In these works, and others in the exhibition that hint at figuration, Goodroad sometimes depicts full figures, but more often we see half-formed, floating limbs and parts, difficult for the viewer to resolve into a final form. This slippage between figuration and abstraction lends an openness to these works. With no selfreflection or discrete representation, the viewer can slide easily in and out Goodroad’s immersive images.
On the back wall of the main gallery, the diptych “Spring” and “Winter,” both dated 2019-20, are oil painted on copper, the glowy luminescence of the metal peeking through the layers of paint, adding an ethereal dimensionality to these landscapes. Goodroad’s scrupulous brushwork appears here in the faint outlines of treelike forms, etched into the surface of the canvas with the back of his brush.
With “Untitled (Big Green)” (2018-20) a large canvas depicting lush, amorphous botanicals in corals, verdant greens and violets dominating the second gallery, these landscapes are particularly transportive.
In all three paintings, the artist’s flowing, expressive brushstrokes carry the viewer from side to side, top to bottom across the surface of the artworks.
In a 2017 essay, “Greasy Side Down,” for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s online publication Open Space, Goodroad reflected, “Painting, like the road, is a series of compositional and emotional queues shifting and changing. … One wonders who’ll understand and what’s the meaning, how can anyone know?” In the paintings in this exhibition, Goodroad visually expresses this openness to experience, favoring the process of making and looking over interpretation. He welcomes our tired, pandemic-weary eyes, and with art creates a sanctuary for feeling and seeing.