The Brooklyn Rail

For London-based artist Catherine Goodman CBE, drawing and painting are meditative acts, whether performed in the silence of her studio or the landscapes that call her back time and again. She infuses her practice with inspiration gleaned from poetry, film, travel, and memory. For some forty years, teaching has also played a central role in her life, allowing her to tend to the development and education of her students while coming to terms with the ways her own art-making practice continues to unfold. In 2000 she co-established the Royal Drawing School with HM King Charles III, an independent charitable art school in London’s East End created to address the increasing absence of observational drawing in art education and to give wider access to disadvantaged students. Her paintings are held in significant private and public collections. A monograph focusing on the artist's new body of work is also being published this spring. 

We met over Zoom to talk about Silent Music, Goodman’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth that presents large-scale abstract paintings that pulse with her expressive brushwork and vivacious use of color. Along the way, we chatted about her childhood, her family, and the habits and leaps of faith that shape her practice.

Ann Collins (Rail): Tell me about your early interest in art making. Did you always know you wanted to be an artist?

Catherine Goodman: I grew up in a house with a lot of art. My dad’s grandparents, Lady Ottoline Morrell and her liberal MP husband Philip Morrell, were part of the Bloomsbury group in England. They were pacifists during the First World War and they had a house called Garsington Manor just outside Oxford where they provided sanctuary for poets and writers. Ottoline herself didn’t paint or write, but she was a convener of talent. Whether it was Virginia Woolf or D.H. Lawrence or Siegfried Sassoon or Stanley Spencer or Mark Gertler, lots of the artists and writers of the time gathered there and stayed there—some of them for quite prolonged periods—and often in gratitude, the artists would leave a painting or a drawing, or Ottoline would buy work from them. Much of what she collected has gone now because the family ran out of money and things got sold, but I did grow up in this very bohemian house with, you know, a Picasso on the wall, or a Stanley Spencer, or a Vanessa Bell, or a Dora Carrington—there were just loads of different images around me.

My grandmother, who was Ottoline’s only child, had also grown up in this environment. I had a very strong sense of myself as an artist from when I was a small child, and my grandmother always encouraged me. To be a woman and to be an artist was not an unusual thing for her. It would have been much more unusual if I’d chosen to be a solicitor or a doctor or something.

I have four sisters, and I’ve got a sister with quite severe disabilities, Sophie, and we all grew up like puppies in a basket. I think drawing and painting was my space of refuge and privacy. I remember drawing in the garden in Oxfordshire, where my grandmother lived, when I was about seven and having a kind of apocalyptic revelation. I experienced a sense of the unity of everything. That was such a huge moment for me that I still remember it very, very keenly. I guess it might be what the Buddhists would call “non-dualism,” but poets talk about it, too. So many different creatives talk about that kind of sacred space. As a child, it was both a playful space and a deeply serious space as well; it had both those facets to it. I find it hard to put a name to that sense of connection, and I try not to, really, because of everything else that sticks to those names. But I’m very keenly aware that painting, for me, is a place of spiritual growth. And I think if you see my paintings, you can see that.

Rail: It sounds like you found yourself in a space or in a state at seven that you didn’t know existed, and you’ve been able to cultivate that space in your practice throughout your life. Can you talk a little bit about the development of your artmaking practice and what it now looks like?

Goodman: You know, I’ve taught drawing for forty years, so I’ve learned that there are some people whose brains veer more towards an image than text—nowadays they would say that the neural pathway goes more towards the image—and usually what goes alongside that is a kind of natural graphic ability. And I think I very much had that when I was a kid. I would just draw all the time, as many kids do. I was lucky because my grandmother helped me to find a bridge from that into adulthood. I think for an artist, you just need one person, whether it’s a family member or a mentor or somebody who just recognizes that you have this gift.

When I went to art school at age eighteen, I was already drawing a lot. I did my BA at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, a very good school in London which had a brilliant faculty. Then I went to the Royal Academy in London for three years to do my masters, and there was a lot of skill-based drawing going on there. The educational world in London at that time hadn’t yet tumbled into a more conceptualized approach to art education. So I put in many, many hours of drawing from life—either a person or a place or going out into the city or whatever. It’s very obvious, but what I learned from that (against drawing from a digital image) is that life is alive, and nature is alive, and it’s huge. People are alive and they’re always changing, so they’re always setting a challenge for you if you’re trying to draw them. Whether you’re sitting in a park, or you’ve got a friend in front of you, or you’re sitting on a bus or anything, life is always throwing change at you. You have to move quickly, and you have to focus your attention, and be prepared for failure, and be prepared to risk and go beyond your comfort zone, and all those very important things. And with that comes a certain confidence.

Rail: I love what you’re saying. I think that that’s true of a lot of creativity. I taught for fifteen years in a Master’s program in documentary filmmaking, and I would say to students: you can have a spreadsheet, and you can have a plan on paper, but that’s really not what this form is about. What you plan might not be what happens, or when you get there, it might not be what you’re anticipating, so instead you need to trust that moment and yourself in that moment to follow where the world is leading you.

Goodman: Absolutely. I think it is that trust. And I think confidence comes from trust. When you’ve managed to transform something that is out of your control, you begin to see that it can happen again. You can do it again.

Rail: I always sort of feel like the universe is chaos but no matter what form you’re working in, you’re going into the chaos to try to figure out what you want to take away from it for yourself.

Goodman: Well, that is where the alchemy happens, isn’t it? And I guess it’s why we keep wanting to make more.

Rail: Do you draw every morning or every day, or are you less scheduled about that?

Goodman: I always have a sketchbook on me. This last week, my dad’s been in hospital, and I’ve been drawing him all the time in various stages of consciousness. And tonight I have my Drawing from Film group here in the studio. We meet every Monday evening, and that’s a pretty sacred time. I never do anything else on a Monday evening unless I’m in New York. I think that regularity and rhythm is hugely important in the creative life. But I don’t think it’s necessary for me to start the day with drawing. I actually often start the day with a poem. I read a lot of poetry, and at the moment I’m reading Rainer Maria Rilke, so I just choose a Rilke poem to kind of open up those muscles of my imagination in the morning, maybe just for twenty minutes with a cup of coffee. Because I find those visual portals very important, and poetry, I think, does it better than anything for me. Some people I know use music. But I think the idea that you can share in another’s mind in that way, that they can open up images for you that you would not see otherwise—I find that so important somehow.

Rail: Like a sense of collective collaboration?

Goodman: Exactly. Now I have an assistant a couple of days a week, but for many years, I just was isolated in the studio. I use my meditation practice when I’m working in the studio and I’m quite an introverted person, so I was okay with that, but a lot of people really, really struggle with the isolation of the creative life, or they struggle when they first build a studio practice, particularly if they don’t have any money or any help. I always say to my students: just think of everybody else picking up their brushes in the morning—all those people all over the city. There’s a kind of hidden community where we’re all engaging in that struggle of wanting to bring something about. I think that can be really energizing and supportive. You know, you may not even know who they are, but it’s important. Community is so important when things aren’t going too well, and for a lot of young artists, things aren’t going too well.

Rail: It’s such a lovely image to think of everybody else picking up their brushes all over town. Can you talk a little bit about your meditation practice, how you use it in your art making?

Goodman: Meditation is always fantastically simple, isn’t it? Sit still and follow your breath. I work with a mantra, and I just sit in the morning for half an hour, and I try to sit in the evening for half an hour. I have a timer on my phone, which I began to use in the studio during lockdown. It was actually an incredibly creatively fertile time for me. I know it wasn’t for everybody, but I felt very alive somehow with the restriction of things. My mom has Alzheimer’s, and it was difficult to get caregivers during COVID, so I was staying with her and then going to the studio, and nobody else was in the studio, so I started putting my meditation timer on to give myself a bit more structure, because there was so little demand from anywhere else.

I work on between four and eight paintings at the same time to give myself a bit of distance from each image. I work on one for half an hour, and then I go around to the next. If the painting is really asking it of me, I obviously break that. I try not to be too rigid. And certainly, towards the end of a painting, sometimes you have to keep going, because the painting kind of has a life of its own by that point. And you need to listen to it as well as to yourself, and as well as to the half-hour structure—but I found the timer hugely helpful. Obviously, everybody is so different in the way that they work, and some people really need to just focus on one image and see it through. But I also think silence is my language somehow. My studio assistants always say that I’m just a nightmare around noise, which I am. When I’m working, I’m in a very, very sensitized state. Too much noise can be just terrible and painful.

Rail: I know people who can write with music on, but for me, if I’m going to listen to music, I’m going to listen to music, and if I’m going to write, I’m going to write. My brain can’t tune out one thing to focus enough on the other. So I support you, Catherine. You tell your studio assistants. [Laughter]

Goodman: Thank you. [Laughs]

Rail: I’m wondering why you became a painter specifically. Why is that your medium?

Goodman: I think if I was born again, I would want to be a filmmaker, because film has been such a huge inspiration for me. Some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century were filmmakers. Federico Fellini or Andrei Tarkovsky—they’re my pin ups—as well as lots of artists. My Monday night group has been drawing recently from La Strada, that early Fellini film from 1954, and I had such a sense when I went out into the street from drawing it one evening, of seeing everything through Fellini’s eyes. It was extraordinary to suddenly have that sense of the power of a person’s vision. The sense that genius is somehow transferable can be very exciting. A bit like a poet, I suppose, as I was saying earlier.

Also, my mom comes from a Russian background, and I think there’s a part of me that’s always kind of sought that heritage. And that’s why Tarkovsky means so much to me and Russian literature and Russian poetry. I love Akhmatova—Anna Akhmatova—who was this great female poet in Russia. It’s such a strange place, Russia. Russia pretends to be West, but it’s equally East. It’s such a contradiction of cruelty and beauty.

But in terms of filmmaking, I think I’m not somebody who very naturally thinks in a third dimension. I’m very interested in space, but I’m interested in pictorial space, not really creating a third dimension. Having said that, I think that medium—as you get older—is something that you need to keep exploring the way a child keeps exploring. I take a lot of photographs. I also just did a two-week residency in November at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island, and I found it so inspiring. All of a sudden, the whole world of print has opened up again for me, and that’s been very exciting.

Rail: You’ve said that you travel a lot and that travel informs your work in many ways. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Goodman: I have traveled a lot, but I have to say I mainly travel to the same places. I think when you start making work somewhere, and you become very sensitized to the landscape and to the place, it pulls you back somehow. If it’s a good experience and you find it fertile—whether it’s the atmosphere or the light or the culture or the people, whatever it is—I think it’s a bit like an animal burying something, and you need to kind of go back and dig it up. If you stand for a week, drawing in a field, and receiving all the things that happen when you’re doing that—from the birds to the kids playing to all of those things—it kind of becomes part of you then. And I feel the need to return.

I spent many years going to this one location in India called the Kullu valley, which is in the Himalayas, because I had a friend who lived there, and I would go back twice a year. Vikram Seth, the very famous Indian poet and writer is one of my best friends, and he’s really opened up India for me in a way that has been a huge privilege in my life. Somehow I have more fun there. India has a sense of the unconscious being very much close to the surface, and somehow there’s something a bit more porous to me about how people live. There seems to be more of a sense of creativity being a little bit closer to the surface. I’ve always found that in India everyone wants to decorate everything. Everyone wants to bring color and details to their lives. And I’ve always found that very inspiring.

I’m thinking again of what you were saying about chaos. However we think of chaos, chaos is also our intuitive selves, you know, and I think that there is always a desire in our world to mitigate that and overly control it. And certainly, I think the intuitive life, the need to decorate—just watch somebody on the phone with a pen and a pad, they’re always doodling and making things—so much of that is squashed out of young people when they’re at school, and the sadness is that when it’s gone, it’s gone. Anxiety or stress or a lack of confidence do so much to suppress it, to label it as wasting time. And yet, I think it’s part of the human condition. That’s why fashion is so important to people, because it’s quite often their only art form.

Rail: Play is taken away from us earlier and earlier in our society, but I think play can be a way of figuring out the world or maybe figuring out a new pathway through the world. When you take that away, things become very limited. But I never thought about fashion as a covert way of being playful and expressing yourself. That makes so much sense.

Goodman: I often think about how, for many women in England, the garden is a really important place. I think that what women wear and what they do with their gardens and their homes is often the place where they can express their creativity in a way that they couldn’t otherwise. People are always asking why there aren’t more women artists. I think it isn’t just a question of permission. The only time ever that I haven’t felt like painting was when I was doing up my little house, because suddenly the house was my canvas. And I realized that it was so fulfilling somehow. And then I watch my sister, in her garden, and I see that’s a place where she’s painting with another medium.

Rail: It’s a very interesting thought, the idea of you connecting with your sister in a moment where you say, “Oh, we actually do the same thing. I’m doing it on canvas, and you’re doing it in the garden.” And of course, because it’s your sister, what’s informing your work might also be—at least partially—informing her work.

Getting back to your painting, I’m very curious about how you use color. The recent paintings that are at Hauser & Wirth feel very joyful to me—the pinks and oranges and yellows—but that might be inaccurate. There was a red, white, and blue painting that I was very curious about, especially at this moment in America, but of course, that might not be your association with those colors.

Goodman: I think color is very mysteriously connected with feeling for all of us. I’m really glad that you say that about what those paintings gave you, but there’s quite a lot of pain in there too. I think about the painters from the past that I love—whether it’s Titian or Henri Matisse or whoever—and how the color in their work is extraordinarily important. I’ve drawn a lot from art that’s moved me, but I think color is a kind of gift. I suppose it’s another sense. I don’t think, “I’m going to make this painting about a particular color”—the colors just literally arrive. I think William Blake said that he wrote by dictation, and I feel that a bit about my work.

The paintings at Hauser & Wirth were all linked to landscapes that I had worked in, to my history and my memories and to relationships with people that have been there and have been important to me. So there was a kind of fusion of portrait and landscape, of place and people. Where the paintings are hung in the gallery is less important, I think, than their relationship to each other in that space.

With the blue, red, and white one, I was quite conscious that it was going to New York and that it was linked to a Bob Dylan song that I love about a junior penitentiary called “Walls of Red Wing.” You don’t hear it very often, but it’s part of his Bootleg Series recordings. It’s a beautiful song, and for some reason it kept going round in my head. There was so much anxiety around the election, and I guess there still is so much anxiety. And that goes out into the world as well as just the States, but that also somehow seemed to be part of that painting.

Rail: When you were making the works that are now in Hauser & Wirth, did you think of them as a series of interrelated works, or were you leaving the relationships between them that we see in the gallery more open-ended?

Goodman: I didn’t pre-plan them too much, but I did think of them as a series. I wasn’t sure how long they would take me, or how far I would get with it. But I think again, it goes back to the same theme that we’ve been talking about: if you give your intuition some authority, it does a lot of the work for you. And intuitively, that show just came together. I was really pleased, it didn’t take long to install or anything—the show hung itself. I didn’t have measurements for the space. It’s a very beautiful space, that top space in the gallery, with that natural light. It’s great to have that sense of the images speaking to each other across the space, which you only get when something’s hanging. It’s like listening to an orchestra, all the different voices begin to speak to each other.

Rail: You’ve spoken about multiple considerations coming into play in your work; for example, there can be a lot of thankfulness, but also a lot of grief. Why those dualities?

Goodman: I think grief is a part of life, and if you love a lot, you grieve a lot, because people are always leaving us, and situations are also leaving us, and I think there is transformation in that in some way. That’s what I would hope. Hemingway said something like, “Write where it hurts most.” I often think of that when I’m painting—that sometimes it’s really important to go to that place of the intensity of pain—because it kind of keeps it real.

I think maybe because of the Russian culture I grew up in, we lived in a kind of pond of melancholy. Russians aren’t frightened of pain, right? They live off it. [Laughs] As a child, I found that really hard, but I think as an adult, we have two responsibilities: one is not to become bitter and cynical. It’s a hard thing to talk about because it begins to sound like a cliche, but I think that is a huge responsibility somehow. And the other one is to allow thankfulness to be part of your everyday life, and not to get too weighed down by our anxiety and our fear and all of those things that can dominate.