October 4 – October 24, 2003
Ethel Sergeant Clark Smith Gallery
In October the Wayne Art Center (WAC) will present a special exhibition, Eileen Goodman: Drawings, Paintings & Watercolors, 1964-2003. On display will be more than 30 works painted over a 40-year period by this acclaimed Pennsylvania artist, best known for her watercolors of still life flowers and fruit. Organized by WAC, the show is the first to examine Eileen Goodman’s entire career.
Raised in Montclair, N.J., Ms. Goodman moved to Philadelphia at 17, and studied illustration with Jacob Landau at the Philadelphia College of Art (now known as the University of the Arts) from 1954 to 1958. Although she intended to pursue a career as an editorial and magazine illustrator, Ms. Goodman also attended painting classes with Morris Berd and Larry Day. Soon after graduation, she abandoned illustration to concentrate on figure and still life painting.
The Wayne Art Center’s exhibition opens with a self-portrait drawing, completed in 1964, when the artist was 26, and includes other early works such as Woman, 1964, which reflects Goodman’s admiration for works by the Bay Area figurative painters, and two still lifes, Toys and Marbles, for which her young daughter’s toys served as inspiration. Goodman continued painting still lifes and working with oil paint through the late 1980s, when she started working exclusively in watercolor. She is one of the few artists to use this medium on a monumental scale. Ms. Goodman explains: “The larger scale forces a fluidity and freedom that I could not achieve in smaller formats, and the colors I was using became even intense and deeper.”
Ms. Goodman’s works are part of the permanent collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The State Museum of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College. She is represented by Gross-McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia.
Eileen Goodman has taught at the University of the Arts since 1967, and is the Wayne Art Center’s 2003 Priscilla Havemeyer Huston Artist in Residence. Funded by a gift from the HBE Foundation, this residency program brings a distinguished artist to the Center each year to teach. WAC members are invited to join Eileen Goodman on Saturday, October 4, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., for a Still Life Painting Workshop, where they can work from varied still life set-ups using drawing, oil and/or watercolor media. Issues of color, proportion, composition, structure, light and shade, and perspective will be addressed, and participants’ artwork will be discussed and critiqued.
Eileen Goodman: Drawings, Paintings and Watercolors, 1964-2003 will be on exhibition in the Ethel Sergeant Clark Smith Gallery from October 4 through 24. A members’ reception to meet the artist will be held Saturday, October 11, from 5 to 7 p.m.
Image: Eileen Goodman, Kumquats Piled in a Bowl
