Collected 37b Untitled Copyright © Joan Goldin
JOAN GOLDIN EDITIONS
Joan Goldin began her career over seventy years ago when, as an artistic and inquisitive eleven-year-old, she attended her first autopsy, seeking to find what was under the skin in order to better draw the human form. Drawing in her sketchbook while recovering from a surgery at thirteen, she was encouraged by one of her physicians to pursue what would be a successful career in medical art. After graduating from the University of Illinois Medical School, Chicago, she began illustrating medical publications, including the Atlas of Advanced Surgical Techniques. Transitioning to fine art, she later earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA from Bard College, New York, and completed her studies toward a PhD in Philosophy from European Graduate School, Switzerland.
In all that she creates, her medical background is in play, with a startling ability to focus on the cellular level and instill life and movement to two-dimensional space. Photography, used to document surgeries for illustration, has become central to her work as a fine artist, its immediacy essential to focusing on the specific and capturing ideas to explore, so she could dig deeper “… at one point I would have planted myself in the dark, I would have dug down as in the peat bogs in Ireland … as nature becomes tighter and tighter and more insular, so my work often goes to the dark side, even though I use color, I can keep it buoyant with color, but in my head often it’s the dark side.”
She continues to seek and reveal in her art what is below the surface: peeling a watermelon while preserving the form to reveal the delicate tissue for a series of mixed media works; documenting the butchering of a goat for a large-scale oil on canvas classical treatment; layering the skins of hares used for taxidermy to stage a photographic collage, and moving from there to myriad techniques and mediums that resurrect the animal in an extraordinarily varied and vast number of works.
Much of her work can be described as evolving. Photographs are painted over, cut and reworked for collage, rephotographed, printed and painted over again. And, at every stage, an original work is produced and preserved. Her oil paintings, early portraiture and still life on board, stirring spiritual motifs, and powerful abstracts on canvas, are likewise fluid, often photographed for new works, and then conceived in new ways, sometimes painted over completely. Durability is acknowledged as critical to an artist’s sensibility. In Joan Goldin’s process, change and perpetual motion prevent a final ending.
“What is so exciting about her new show at the Flinn Gallery Greenwich Library, and then Collected Works, Joan Goldin the upcoming publication, is the fact that after years of keeping her work essentially private, she has now opened it fully to the public.”
Joan Goldin in her studio, photographs: Deborah Oropallo
