Thursday

The Trouble with Ravens by Matthew Goodsell

The Trouble with Ravens by Matthew Goodsell

An inventive dead girl with mechanical wings sitting on a gigantic egg. A slave with haunting despair in his eyes. Tinkerbell’s mug shot from a Reno jail. Matthew Goodsell’s subjects aren’t all dark fantasy and gloom—they’re just drawn that way. At once disturbing and instantly iconic, Goodsell’s The Trouble with Ravens series, hand-drawn, digitally painted black and white portraits painstakingly rendered in startling photo-realistic detail, depict the personal demons that at one time nearly consumed him. Pointedly provocative, the compositional vignettes demand of the viewer a new way of seeing and imagining the artist’s creative process in the post digital age.

A completely self-taught artist, Goodsell took the path least traveled to the fine art community, combining his fondness for traditional mediums—specifically graphite pencil—with a command of powerful digital painting tools. Because his paintings are sometimes mistaken for manipulated photographs, Goodsell is careful to point out that “almost all of my pieces start out as graphite pencil drawings on either cold pressed illustration board, or watercolor paper. The detailed portraiture is then followed with a light sketch of supporting elements before scanning the drawing into digital form and the painting is finished digitally, by hand.”

Many of the paintings in his The Trouble with Ravens collection are coupled with fragmented Tanka-like poems that accentuate the impact of each piece. In his Self Portrait, Goodsell’s stern, coiled gaze appears to foreshadow an emotional eruption; with clouded strokes, he blurs the subject’s clenched fists and furled brow. Below it, the caption reads: “Contempt, for the blue black wings. Longing however is a mirror.” But the artist’s accompanying sub-caption takes the dark tone of the painting even further: “A paintbrush/A bullet/A wall/And a gun.”

Goodsell’s paintings often mock what he sees as self-centered indulgence in contemporary angst, yet his artistic curiosity compels him to both covet and explore that impulse. “I see so much that appears barren and empty, yet I’m drawn to it. There’s a certain narcissism about art. I wanted to contrast this for example, with the overwhelming gravity, the unpretentious beauty of the slave’s haunted face. Which is the whole point of the series really: the juxtaposition of being drawn to beauty, in subject matter situations that are anything but.”

Goodsell’s vision is tragically beautiful. The leaves he paints are falling; their serrated edges visible in the shadows. There’s a supple bend in their form, as if suspended in an invisible liquid. The limbs of Goodsell’s trees are barren; naked in a noble fragility found just this side of the painter’s private winter. The thematic cohesiveness of The Trouble with Ravens is held together by Goodsell’s black symbology and a penchant for the supernatural. Ravens are shape-shifters and the messengers of the spirit world, whose mysterious magic gives the initiate courage to enter the void.

Goodsell’s winged subjects are the dark angels of purgatory awaiting Gabriel’s call that never comes. There is a resignation in their flightless sadness. Something lost. Something stolen. Something strayed. Something has died inside them, and Goodsell seems to have captured the exact moment of that realization. The melancholy lyricism of the artist’s resonant compositional tones play like discordant chords on the black keys of an undertaker’s toy piano.

What outshines the elemental darkness of Goodsell’s work is his relentless, transcendent imagination and craft mastery. The precision in Goodsell’s work is breathtaking. An up-close examination of the woven insulated telephone wire in Goodsell’s signature piece, exhaustively titled “An odd, inventive, dead girl flying along minding her own business, discovers a secret and lets her maternal instincts get the better of her,” reveals an intricate Chinese fingerlock pattern in the fabric that’s spot on in its authenticity. The clockwork pinwheels of the dead girl’s sharp, fan-folded mechanical wings have a retro futuristic shape, form and patina. The whole scene seems lifted from a 20’s sci fi film. The viewer is struck by the remarkable planetary roundness of the dead girl’s enormous egg nestled in it’s bed of branches. Even the artist’s half-tones possess a crystalline electric light that, in some of his pieces, manages to be both muted and opaque.

There is no containment when the viewer engages Goodsell’s subjectivity, and this might be the artist’s greatest achievement with this series.

Selected works from The Trouble with Ravens series by painter Matthew Goodsell are currently being exhibited at Strega Gallery 310 Arlington Ave. in downtown Reno, as well as in a window display on the corner of 1st and Sierra Street downtown.

By Oliver X