Abduction By Boat 1963

Robert Goodnough made this untitled painting, Abduction By Boat, with oil on canvas. The circular format is interesting, like looking through a porthole, and the way that he applied thin washes of color, almost like watercolor, gives the piece a luminous, airy quality. Look closely at how the brushstrokes build up the forms, creating a sense of movement. It’s like a flurry of shapes, figures, birds almost, all swirling in a dance. I find myself drawn to the center, where the colors seem to collide and merge. The lines, a mix of hard edges and softer gradients, creates a push and pull between structure and fluidity. It is interesting that Goodnough, who began as an abstract expressionist, would later move towards figuration, and you can see the beginnings of that here. This piece makes me think of Stuart Davis, the way he combines abstraction with hints of recognizable forms, but here there’s also a kind of narrative element, the feeling of a story unfolding. Art is about process and Goodnough embraces the ambiguity, the space between seeing and knowing.