Art - Gary Goodman

The first thing I ask Gary Goodman when I sit him down and interview him on the terrace of the HQ Gallery, is perhaps the most thorny of the questions that I want to put to him. “You must get a lot of people saying,” I propose, “’I could have done that. My ten year old kid could have done that.’” “I get that all the time,” he replies. He’s a quiet spoken guy, with a slightly vulnerable air about him. An immediately likable guy, actually. “It’s not like a vegetable or an animal has done the painting, with no thought behind it. People say it’s child-like or naïve. But there is quite a lot of sophistication in the emotional space it has come from. It’s spontaneous, sure. And it’s intuitive. But it isn’t empty. There are plenty of thoughts, emotions and experiences behind it. And plenty of pain.”

“The other thing I get all the time,” he continues, “is that people find it too scary. ‘I couldn’t live with it every night’, they say.” He pauses. “I have a daughter with an incurable disease, who’s nineteen now. As a parent I carry some of that around for 24 hours a day, and that can’t help but come through in my art. It’s not blatant, but it’s there.”

Most of his paintings include images of animals. There are crows, or bears, or dogs in nearly every picture. “I adore animals,” he says. “I like their unpredictability. The way they are untamed and wild and free. I hear that in Scotland they were thinking of reintroducing wild animals - lynxes and eagles and wolves - into the Highlands, but they didn’t because people were concerned about the welfare of their children. I have this image of a goat coming along and disturbing all these polite and bland people having a picnic. I’d definitely side with the goat.”