Jeremy Goodding, Spanish Memories, oil, 28 x 22.
In his classic still-life paintings, Jeremy Goodding routinely incorporates pieces from his personal collection of pottery, often pairing them with leaves, twigs, and other organic treasures he finds outside his Nebraska home. A majority of his works feature modern pottery presented in a traditional fashion, says Goodding, but for his winning entry, he chose to portray a 19th-century Spanish water jug he acquired in Santa Fe, NM, in 2019. The artist recalls feeling an immediate connection to the old vessel. “I fell in love with the shape, the handle, the copper sulfide that runs up toward the neck—the piece just spoke to me,” he says.
Back home in his studio, Goodding painted the jug a couple of times. “But neither piece delivered on the full quality I thought was possible for it,” he says. Then the artist placed a bundle of fresh pink roses in the vase and left them there without water. Within a few days, the blossoms wilted and dried. “That was a revelatory moment, because suddenly, the roses became part of the history—of the memory of Spain, of the roses once in their prime,” says Goodding. “It started to all come together.”
For SPANISH MEMORIES, the artist dimmed the lighting more than he usually does. “There had to be a delicate balance in the value relationship between the roses and the highlights on the pottery,” he explains. “When you’re painting an earthen vessel like this, it has an extremely soft feel to it. The sense of form is very gentle as it transitions from light to dark.”
Find Goodding’s work at Mary Williams Fine Arts, Boulder, CO, and Illume Gallery of Fine Art, St. George, UT.
This story appeared in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.