Interview with Guy Goodwin and David Reed

David Reed: Guy, how did you make the painting in this exhibition?

Guy Goodwin: I would collect and amass big mounds of paint, three feet in diameter, each on a sheet of plywood, covered with plastic. Usually a painting took five or six moves, one a day, each from a different pile. I knew that I had to set aside a week when I wouldn’t be interrupted. If I ran out of a color, and you know, my funds were limited, the painting would die.

DR: So each of those big marks…

GG: …took a day.

DR: Would you go back into a mark from the previous day again?

GG: No. I would put it down and that would be it. The next day would be the next mark. The painting was painted while upright. I had to get all the color up there in those trails, and get it to feel right.

DR: It took you a whole day to make one mark?

GG: It might look like you just went across the surface once, but there was a lot more to it than that. As the painting built up, as the paths crossed each other, there was more and more paint up on the surface. I didn’t want it to be spilling down into the open areas, so I had to really be in control. It was a matter–of–fact kind of thing — keep all the material moving. It was really just a kind of a task. That’s the only way I can put it. There are eight of those paintings. It took almost a year to do them all because I had to work and collect the paint. I could do about one painting a month. It was all very methodical. When the paintings started to percolate there would be a feeling of magnification, that’s the main thing I remember. That’s the strange power of these paintings. The sensation was that I was making small marks — just magnified way up. I always had to keep the mark from spreading, so it would remain a mark.

DR: These paintings are so in your face — no messing around. They seem somehow to be an answer to the disparaging, critical attitude towards painting at the time. Do you remember that?

GG: Absolutely! Are you kidding, man? Painting was thought to be a waste of time, a joke. Come on, you know that; so many people felt that way, absolutely. But then I was interested in those ideas. They seemed to have some kind of resilience. They made sense in the face of the war in Vietnam. In those days everything was being questioned. I wanted to find out why people thought that way. I was tortured by it…but it was silly to say that a process and material were exhausted. Painting is just a medium, using a neutral material. Sometimes illusion was questioned. But what isn’t illusory? That just didn’t make sense. Maybe it would have been better to say: “Art is over.” Yes, art was threatened. It’s always threatened.