On My Recent Figurative Kinetic Paintings
John Goodyear · Leonardo · 1983
In 1977, after 10 years as a sculptor, I began making kinetic paintings again. The simplest canvas and wood constructions of 1965 became the structural model for the new work. A wooden grid suspended from above in front of a painted canvas serves to partially block the image behind it. When the grid is set in motion, gliding back and forth in front of the image, different aspects of the image appear sequentially. The image is plotted into four 'zones' repeating across the canvas, and the grid obscures one zone at a time making possible an animation of the image-almost a cinematic effect without built-in lighting, lenses or motors. (Motors came into the larger works in 1979.) The works were done in black and white to differentiate them from the highly colored pieces of the early 1960s [ 1]. The colored works had been more complex and multi-layered, creating a 3dimensional field of shifting chance color relationships. The new black and white pieces of the 1970s began to isolate and define ways of seeing discrete shapes move around on the canvas. This 'virtual' motion could make elements move up and down, diagonally, and even back, into an imagined space, through a simple lateral movement of the grid. These investigations were carried out in a non-figurative manner on canvases measuring 90 , 90 cm. 'Four negatives' (Fig. 1) suggested subject matter, although none had been intended. The shift to figurative works, 'The Blow' (Fig. 2) and 'Beckoning', in 1979, constitute a move toward representing small events. A hammer strikes a blow at a block of something which fragments, regroups itself and is struck again. The hand beckoning was given a central portion which does not move and an index finger which does. This event functioned as a continuity. (The mechanism shows off cyclic events rather than progressive