Untitled 1976

Robert Goodnough made this untitled painting with blocks of acrylic on canvas. It's like he's playing with mosaics, but instead of tiles, it’s paint. The background has these vertical streaks, watery blues and greens, which make the clusters of colored shards float. Look at that red shape near the bottom – it’s not quite a star, not quite a flower, but something in between. Each of these shapes are made up of smaller polygonal marks. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope! Goodnough reminds me a bit of Joan Miró, with his playful abstraction and bright colors. But where Miró feels like pure fantasy, Goodnough keeps one foot in the real world, like he's capturing a fleeting moment, a gust of wind scattering leaves. There's an ongoing conversation between artists, remixing ideas and approaches, and Goodnough’s painting is another voice in that chorus.