Lezli Goodwin: Vivid Blue
iPlugin, August 2002, by Dina Daoud
Abstract painter Lezli Goodwin resembles more of a stay at home mom than a contemporary artist with her family room full of Power Puff Girls party decorations and lunchboxes full of drink boxes and animal crackers.
But the 27 year old artist, who uses monochrome colors to create her signature glossy pieces, is on her way to becoming a prolific painter. "I'm not a soccer mom who is a painter in her spare time," says Goodwin. "I finish one to two pieces a week; that's over a hundred pieces a year."
It took her only two years to make the transition to full-time painter. After graduating from college in 1997, Goodwin and her husband left Iowa for Scottsdale, Arizona, to take advantage of the city's thriving arts community. Home to 120 art galleries and hosting 25 major art exhibits a year, Scottsdale's art scene is built on the Native American, western pioneer and Spanish culture.
"Scottsdale is thought of as being the cowboy art scene," she says. "We moved here because it also had a solid contemporary artist's community in place." Goodwin is quickly making a name for herself, as one of a few artists to create abstract work with glazed acrylic paint.
Using paint straight out of the tube, Goodwin achieves depth of color with glazing instead of mixing her colors on a palette. "I like really vivid, pure, clear colors," says Goodwin, who paints mostly with blue acrylic. "By using the glaze, my paintings look like they glow, instead of looking opaque, if I had mixed my colors with white."
Influenced by Ad Reinhardt and Roy Lichtenstein, she uses a Liquitex liquid medium to break down the binder in the paint. She applies the syrupy glaze to a white canvas, building the richness of color in a dozen sheer layers with a hake brush. To show gradations in color or add geometric bands and shapes, Goodwin applies white paint to her canvases. Then she adds more layers of blue glaze on top of the white after it dries.
My blues aren't lighter, they're brighter because when light hits the white paint under the blue it reflects back, making it look bright," says Goodwin. She describes this technique as a matter of physics, not color. The blue shapes reach the optic nerve and hit the eye faster, giving her painting depth and a luminous surface. Goodwin applies glazing, a minor technique usually found in portrait painting to bring out the white in a subject's eye, in all her pieces. 'Blue Square Series' uses abstract geometric patterns. The glint of white peeking underneath the monochrome blue squares in "Blue Squares VII (2001)" gives is the smooth, cool feel of bathroom tiles.
Waiting for each layer of glaze to dry gives Goodwin the flexibility to run a household. She works on five or six pieces at a time while attending to her seven-year-old daughter and three-year-old son.
Always putting in a full eight-hour day in painting, Goodwin takes advantage of the kids' naptime or rises early to work on advertising, designing postcards and meeting with gallery owners. "Glazing is Zen, it's more in my core, not so much in my brain," says Goodwin. "Art uses very different parts of the brain. I find the business end of art intellectually stimulating. I'm lucky I enjoy not only painting, but being social."
Goodwin also thinks she's lucky she didn't know better to be scared about pursuing her career, especially while growing up in white-collar Des Moines, where everyone works for an insurance company. "My father thought of conceptual, modern art as a hoax perpetrated on the American public," she says. "Once I started painting, my parents became more supportive."
They bought Goodwin's first pieces. She sold to friends, neighbors, and even her dentist in exchange for a porcelain crown. Her work is now shown throughout Arizona and in Denver, Chicago and Washington, DC.
With exhibitions already in place for later this year, Goodwin continues to balance the demands of her career with raising a family.
"I moved here intending to become a professional artist, but now I also get to develop my childrens' interest in art," she says. Goodwin's labor will pay off handsomely in a few years with two artist's assistants working for Mommy.