BRENT GODFREY NATURE|NURTURE
BRENT GODFREY NATURE | NURTURE
JUNE 26 - JULY 26. 2015
LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com cover: Upstage, 2015, oil on linen, 48” x 36”
BRENT GODFREY: NATURE | NURTURE In his first solo exhibition at LewAllen Galleries, realist painter Brent Godfrey has created a riveting show entitled Nature|Nurture, consisting of more than 25 virtuosic paintings in oil or acrylic that cap a brilliant career spanning more than 25 years. Using an uncanny ability to infuse gorgeous imagery with mystery and allusive power, Godfrey creates paintings of family and nature whose apparent serenity often disguises a razor sharp capacity to incite memory and provoke re-examination of conventional assumptions. The meaning in these works extends far beyond literalness of subject matter to become subtle metaphor in service of personal authenticity and a better world.
JUNE 26 - JULY 20 2015
A technical painter of the first order, Godfrey’s work often features imagery that can, at first glance and on the surface, seem nostalgic or bucolic, but which nearly always involves complex social and cultural issues or psychological journeys revealed from close contemplation. In some of his works he uses whimsical elements in unlikely juxtapositions to arouse alternative thought about accepted ideas. The seemingly beautiful or humorous dissolves upon closer observation into the powerfully provocative. Blink and an image of a nice mother and child suddenly transforms into a personal memory of intense feeling that the painting unearths from some deep recess of memory. The scumbled form of a naked man running with a huge bear seizes the intellect and becomes a metaphor of the ability of wilderness to inspire grace, as powerful as Faulkner’s classic story of “The Bear.”
Godfrey paints expressions of serious ideas with a technical prowess akin to an Old Master’s and with enormous imaginative ingenuity that frequently reveals his whimsical sense of humor in a diverse oeuvre of sumptuous composition, color, and subject. His integration of abstraction with representational and sometimes incongruent elements translates objects, figures, and landscapes into personal and cultural patterns of self-exposure, both for the artist and his observer. His paintings lure and entertain with visual metaphor, nostalgia and humor, while provoking a sense of wonder and uncertainty that asks, “Please look and please think.”
These are the sorts of responses that can emanate from sitting in front of a Godfrey painting. Beautiful works of art, the paintings generously afford the eye with gratifying visual experience that is both significant and quite enjoyable. But these works also can be powerful catalysts for memory and new thinking. Contemplation of them can be like peeling an onion, revealing in the process of looking layers of complex meanings and semiotic associations. The LewAllen exhibition is entitled Nature|Nurture, a name broadly suggestive of two currents explored in this body of work. Ideas and accepted notions surrounding childhood are engaged by the artist in works whose imagery references mid-century family photography of parents and children while connecting to universal memories through Godfrey’s autobiographical lens. In the service of personal authenticity, these engaging “snapshots” trigger often forgotten or repressed recollection as a foundation to re-examine assumptions about childhood and growth into adulthood. These works bring to mind T. S. Eliot’s lines from Four Quartets that: Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated…. Other of the paintings build an almost mythic specter of the natural world with animal forms suggesting the
Wild Child 3, 2014, oil on canvas, 24” x 24” 2
evolving relationship and blurred boundaries between man and his environment. In these, the artist’s passion for nature is palpable, as is his yearning to arrest the reckless trajectory of man’s too frequent disregard of his place within it and responsibility for its future. Godfrey’s tact is not strident polemic but rather a gentle and wise visual reminder of the splendor of this world, deftly communicated in winsome scenes of pastoral terrain and charming animals. The paintings in this show reveal Godfrey as a master of fusing the observable with the imagined and portraying both as coherent parts of a real world. The work subtly questions conventions of all kinds. Blending a brilliant mind with extraordinary artistic ability, Godfrey suggests and then cannily shatters in his work simplistic accepted ways of thinking about aspects of life: from love, to family, to faith, to nature. His paintings set up traditional notions and then beckon the reflective viewer to challenge them on the viewer’s own terms and informed by that viewer’s own personal experiences. Godfrey has a remarkable capacity for clever use of image to activate memory. He understands that without memory, experience can only be sensation. Only with memory can there be meaning. But memory can be too tidy and Godfrey’s work implies that if left unexamined – what he sometimes calls “untickled” – memory can become a work of fiction displacing fact with details and impressions fashioned by the psyche more to satisfy emotional need than to promote authentic personal growth.
Memory, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 27.75” x 22.25”
“Focus,” and “Wild Child 3,” Godfrey creates painted resemblances of old soft-focus snapshots that he then obscures with various techniques. What is seen as having once been sharp imagery is blurred by him – like old photos and selective recall.
His paintings – despite or perhaps because of their powerful artistic beauty – possess an extraordinary capacity to activate memories that appear in the consciousness like ghosts; apparitions from one’s past that the works invite in but which then can haunt. But those sometimes difficult memories can also enliven and ennoble. From the struggle with inconvenient realities that examination of a Godfrey painting can summon out of forgotten experience, it is possible that liberating insight will come flooding in.
The effect is arresting. The blur conceals but also reveals. The bucolic is made mysterious and, no doubt, the artist is well aware that in the engagement with mystery, wisdom is found. Wellbeing too is most solidly erected on foundations rebuilt from decayed presumption and reexamined memory. The artist says about this “I both blur and add detail; showing less and inferring more…the figures and setting become more thought-like and less illustrative.”
This effect is demonstrated in many of these paintings in which we see that, left alone and faded by the passage of time, childhood memories – like old photos – have a way of washing out all but a few of the details. Godfrey’s “Nurture” series craftily evokes this achromatizing of old photos – and, by analogy, that of memories. With works such as “In the Beginning,” “Lessons,” “Secret,”
Throughout Godfrey’s work there reverberates the disconnection between appearance and reality, the demand made by personal authenticity to question the assumed and grapple with doubt, to struggle for certainty and safety in the face of chaos and danger. In paintings like “Play,” “Lessons,” “Time,” 3
wearing an Indian headdress and a diaper. The title puns the flower and the feather the child has apparently “plucked” from the nearby garden and chicken, as well as the jaunty “pluck” the child exhibits. This is arguably one of the most memorable visual metaphors for an exuberant expression of pure joy and utter freedom in the face of the daunting challenges all children will face in their life ahead. “Recognition” proposes what for some might seem a radical redefinition of the Maestà. It substitutes for the enthroned Madonna and Jesus a man in jeans cradling an ordinary child, his right hand raised in the sign of benediction and his head encircled by a diffuse halo that looks like a gilt cowboy hat. The image, for all its lack of orthodoxy, is as reverential and expertly painted as Duccio’s famous altarpiece in the cathedral of Siena. Many of Godrey’s paintings can be read as dealing with the varieties of man’s engagement with the natural world. Some, like “Act Natural” and “Hathor Dehorned,” present images of a charming fawn or friendly cow in idyllic surrounds. They possess a pastoral seductiveness that reaches out and draws us in to what can be subversive aspects of these paintings – simple innocence of the animals (or in other works, the child) belying dangerous complexities and perils of man’s collision with nature that, upon due regard, must be recognized and engaged.
Anticipation, 2015, oil on panel, 30” x 30”
and even “Bunny Boy” and “Upstage,” intimacy often is hinted at but ends up in tension with distance. Striking paintings from the exhibit also demonstrate directly the artist’s use of quirky humor and ironic incongruity to communicate ideas. Some of these suggest Godfrey’s subtle affinity for a kind of magical realism used to great effect to suggest that the extraordinary should be understood as perfectly usual. The artist offers no visual explanation for why in “Bunny Boy,” for example, the little boy in a bunny suit is holding a revolver; or in “Upstage” a girl in a party dress and designer sunglasses is pushing a fawn away. It is the absence of this information that makes us look more carefully and which conveys the idea that mystery is normal and the fantastic is just a part of ordinary life.
Using powerful imagery and technical prowess, Godfrey’s work explores the sensed world, prodding memory and feeling to tease out the sublime with beautiful paintings that resonate intimately with shared experiences and shift perception with startling coherence. Kenneth R. Marvel
These paintings are humorous but they make serious points if one looks closely: the innocence of children can be an illusion with violent consequences, and human selfishness can shove aside respect for the world outside ourselves. In both, first-glance assumptions of affection are belied by the boy’s gun and the girl’s shove. Things are not what we they seem. Godfrey’s ability to create fanciful epic narrative is also demonstrated in this show. In “Pluck,” we see the wild exaltation that can be had by a child from holding a simple chicken feather and a single flower while 4
The Walk, 2014, oil on linen, 48” x 60”
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Resistance, 2011, oil on panel, 16” x 12”
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Lessons, 2012, acrylic on panel, 15” x 20”
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Little King, 2014, oil on linen, 36” x 30”
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Play, 2013 oil on canvas, 27” x 31”
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Time, 2012, acrylic on linen, 36” x 36”
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Secret, 2014, oil on canvas, 20” x 24”
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Nurture, 2013, acrylic on panel, 28” x 14”
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Search 2, 2012, acrylic on linen, 36” x 48”
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Dry Farm, 2010, acrylic on linen, 36” x 48”
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Allure, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 21.5” x 35”
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In the Beginning, 2011, oil on panel, 20� x 15�
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Recognition, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 40” x 30”
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Bunny Boy, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 20” x 16”
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C19H2802 (Testosterone), 2015, oil on linen, 40� x 30�
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Counting Losses, 2006, oil on linen, 80” x 94”
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Taming the Id, 2014, oil on linen, 24” x 36”
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Pluck, 2015, oil on linen, 48” x 48”
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Act Natural, 2015, oil on panel, 48” x 48”
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Camp, 2011, oil on linen, 24” x 18” 24
Focus, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 27” x 37” 25
Reclining Nudes, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 11.25” x 15.75”
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The Wish, 2013, acrylic on linen, 40” x 30”
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Howl, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 49” x 48”
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Howl 2, 2014, oil on linen, 24” x 24”
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BRENT GODFREY Born: 1957, Ogden, Utah Education: 2006
Fechin Art Academy, Taos, NM
2000
Arte Vita, Florence, Italy University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
1985
Master Education Brigham Young University, Provo, UT
1980
BA (Cum Laude) Weber State University, Ogden, UT
2010
Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2015
LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
2014
A Gallery/Allen + Allen Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT
2011
Translations Gallery, Denver, Colorado A Gallery/Allen + Allen Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT
2010
Lodge Gallery, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT
2008
A Gallery/Allen + Allen Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT
2005
A Gallery/Allen + Allen Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT
2003
A Gallery/Allen + Allen Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT
1998
A Gallery/Allen + Allen Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT
Florence Biennale Fortezza da Basso, Florence, Italy
2002
Utah Artists Invitational, Myra Powell Gallery, Ogden, UT
2001
Utah Artist Invitational, Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Rio Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT
Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT
2011
Springville Art Museum, Springville, UT
San Diego Art Institute, San Diego, CA Highlands Museum of the Arts, Sebring, FL
2008
Alpan Gallery, Long Island, NY
Featured artist, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT
2007
Spring Salon, Springville Art Museum, Springville, UT
2006
A Century of Art, Museum of Utah Art & History, Salt Lake City, UT
Regional Exhibition, St. George Art Museum, St. George, UT
Spring Salon, Springville Art Museum, Springville, UT
2005 Spring Salon, Springville Art Museum, Springville, UT
Selected Museum Exhibitions: 2014
2009
Selected Group Exhibitions: 2007
SOMArts, San Francisco, CA
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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com Š 2015 LewAllen Contemporary LLC Artwork Š Brent Godfrey