Adventure II 1963

Robert Goodnough made this painting, Adventure II, with colourful strokes and block-like shapes of blue, red, green, and black. Can’t you just picture Goodnough in the studio? What an adventure it must have been! I imagine him moving around the canvas, maybe on the floor, maybe on the wall, considering the placement of each form, each color, each gesture, like pieces of a puzzle floating in space, and coming together. Those confident black lines, sometimes sharp and angular, sometimes soft and blurred, feel like a form of drawing in paint. I wonder what his decision-making process was? Trial and error? Intuition? Both, maybe? When I see paintings like this, I think about other painters like Joan Mitchell, or maybe even the early cubists. They are all in conversation, you know, separated by time, but united by a shared language. They inspire one another to keep going, to keep exploring. Because paintings like this remind us that art is an ongoing process, a journey of discovery, not a destination.