Color Abstraction 1967

Robert Goodnough made this 'Color Abstraction' painting with, it seems, watercolor or thin acrylic, sometime in the last century. The blobs of color are like a pile of jelly beans someone scooped up and dumped on a white table top. The black outlines are like little cages, containing each color zone, but, importantly, not quite. This gives a feeling of controlled chaos. Look at how the colors pool and bleed softly into one another. It's a bit like looking through stained glass, but the image is breaking apart. I'm reminded of Joan Mitchell and her desire to create feeling through pure color, yet, here, Goodnough is holding back, not quite giving us pure abstraction. It reminds me that a painting can be a site of struggle, where the artist is working out ideas and experimenting, without necessarily arriving at a final resolution.