It's a World

About

Bambi Goodman:

I don’t know if I make paintings for any particular reason, I don’t think I’m trying to work through any emotion or make a profound political statement (whilst I would like to sometimes). It just seems to me to be something that I do, like going for a walk or making breakfast. I’m not completely detached from my work – I have painted through an anxiety attack and a broken heart, but I think they have an existence all of their own, separate to me. I like it that way.

I paint what I like – and what I like is women and animals. Japanese schoolgirls, cowgirls, girls reading books, girls falling in love with bears and ravens, Van Gogh’s little lark. They are sensitive paintings, while playful and gaudy at times. There is no use trying to make them any more than they are.

Gary Goodman:

I make pictures and I write poems;

it’s a bad habit, it stops me getting bored.

These paintings, drawings and poems are often autobiographical but, like with flypaper, lots of other things stick around:

a book on the table

the full moon

lonely bent-over trees by the side of the road

a blackbird singing in the garden at dusk

looking into the eyes of living animals with warm blood flowing through their bodies

sitting inside watching plump snowflakes slowly drop early evening against streetlamps

walking along the sad seafront out of season

women – clothes – make up – hair – a sudden sniff of perfume – lips – underwear

raindrops in the forest

crows cawing

wolves howling

dogs running

my golden-haired girls

“Poems are just words, paintings are only colours and shapes.”