Art Reviews

Guerrilla Artist
January 20, 1985 MICHIGAN: The Magazine of The Detroit News

Courtesy Xochipilli Gallery
Goodfellow
Detroit's Stephen Goodfellow fights hand-to-paint, and his ideas are as big-and as bold-as his canvases

By MICHAEL MARGOLIN

WHEN MASONIC TEMPLE Theatre general manager Alan Lichtenstein mar- ried Susan Kramer in 1983, part of his dowry was a huge painting called Vandals. It moved with them into their suburban apartment. Susan Kramer Lichtenstein remembers the day friend Lowell Boileau moved it in.

"If you put Vandals in the dining room, you'll have a fireplace in the dining room, too," joked Boileau, referring to the fireplace in the painting. "Yeah," she remembers saying, "but what about the guy urinating in the corner?"

Stephen Goodfellow's Vandals is not an easy picture to take. Its depiction of two robbers

Michael Margolin is a Detroit free-lance writer.

ransacking a house after trussing up the owner and hanging his cats is shocking, brilliant and frighten- ingly real. Literally and figuratively, it savages our conventional assumptions about the safety of hearth and home.

Vandals is quintessential Goodfellow. It seems like the kind of work that would spring from a cynical, angry man raised in abject poverty. Noth- ing could be further from the truth.

Stephen Goodfellow was born 30 years ago in Southampton, England. He never knew his father, a Portuguese colonel, because his mother left him before Stephen was born. An independent and assertive Irishwoman, Manon Goodfellow couldn't put up with the constrictions of life with a male of Latin temperament. Soon afterward she married Danish chemist Morten Mielgaard, and 5-year-old Stephen found himself living in Copenhagen.

As far back as he can remember, Goodfellow was acutely interested in how the world looked and seemed, "partly because I was an outsider."

"Stephen was always an unusual child," re- members his mother. "He had two interests as a 7-year-old painting and blowing up things. He was always a fire hazard."

At Copenhagen's Bernadotte School, he learned to fight back. "Many of the kids were American, and I was teased because I spoke with an English accent," he recalls.

One teacher in that school, however, made an "incredible impression" on young Stephen. Herr Gasbol was a very fat man who taught art and natural history. "Puffing cigars endlessly," he would illuminate scientific principles by drawing with bold strokes on large sheets of paper. "Every- one sat spellbound," Goodfellow recalls, as day after day the huge sheets would be filled with earthbound images of "airports, cars in snow" as the lectures on natural phenomena progressed.

But Gasbol was later fired from his teaching position. "He was teaching sex education," recalls Goodfellow. "For want of a better aid, he thumped his penis on the table and was chucked out."

Even as a child, Goodfellow disliked the rigid Danish morality - "the do's and don'ts" - that motivated such decisions. He didn't know it then, he says, "but I was being socialized. The blood of the soul was seeping out (of me)." His only real solace was "history, science and art."

When Goodfellow was 14, Morten Meilgaard, then a chemist with Carlsberg Breweries, accepted a job in Mexico, and young Stephen embarked on a short, convulsive career of limited warfare and rebellion with religious conservatism and authori- tarian school principals.

By his own admission, Goodfellow was not a good student at the American School in Monter- spent rey, Mexico. "I learned virtually nothing time roaming around in the riverbed" (of the dried-up Monterrey river). His inclination for natural science led to experiments with gunpowder and balloons filled with coal gasses which, hung with battery operated lights, would be sent aloft at sunset, winking onto the Sierra Madre mountains on the horizon. Stephen also organized war games escalating to the Agnostics vs. the Baptists - more and more sophisticated explosive devices which blasted toy battleships to kingdom come. "We buried more toy soldiers than in any war," he says with a grin.

Manon Meilgaard remembers the schoolmaster of the American School in Monterrey as a "Tex- an-Baptist type." Stephen was almost constantly in trouble with the school's authoritarian ap- proach to education. For a poster competition, he produced a strongly anti-Vietnam entry based on the famous WWI poster of Lord Kitchener's patriotic call to action. It may have been the first time Goodfellow's social background joined with his art to fly in the face of convention, not just ruffling feathers but blasting the bird to pieces, but "the schoolmaster said it was the last straw."

The alternative, a Texas military academy just across the American border, featured reveille and saluting the flag. Stephen refused to salute.

Manon Meilgaard then made a decision that changed the course of Stephen's life. While Morten and their young son, Justin, remained in Monter- rey, she traveled to England with Stephen's draw- ings and was able to convince the head of the East Ham Technical College to accept Stephen. At 16, he left his family in Mexico for London, where his passion for art could be nurtured.

"I thought they (my parents) had completely given up on me," Goodfellow recalls. "I was lazy and slow - no, not slow," he says, correcting himself - "intelligent." During those two years at East Ham, "I learned I was not lazy. I was one of the most prolific there."

At the end of two years, in the late '60s,

Goodfellow went on to the Hull Regional College of Art on England's east coast, then the bulwark of the conceptualist credo. He remembers talking forever with fellow students and the faculty: "If you can describe the idea, what's the point of creating the object?" he explains.

Upon finishing his studies at Hull, Goodfellow applied for entrance to several American universi- ties. By then, Morten Mielgaard had accepted a position as vice-president of research at Stroh's and had settled in the Detroit area. Of the six or seven places Goodfellow approached, only two expressed interest - Cranbrook and Wayne State University. "I took one look at Cranbrook," he says. "It was too much like England."

Reasoning that "chaos challenges the mind," Goodfellow decided he preferred Wayne State, where he could be surrounded by "the dirt, grime and muck of a U.S. city." He began work on his master of fine arts degree in 1975, thus beginning the process that would lead to his becoming a major Detroit artist.

T IS A VERY COLD January evening. Snow banks line the streets and sidewalks in the Mielgaards' Birmingham subdivision, where they are giving their annual curry party. Manon has been cooking curries - mild, medium, hot - for days and the buffet, supplemented with tan- doori chicken and eggplant salad, is loaded.

The flavor of curry is matched by the flavor of the accents- Irish and British, East Indian, East African, Iranian, Spanish, a mixture of exotic sounds and amiability. Goodfellow is with Julie Beard, a social worker wearing a pantsuit of Indian silk. His close friend, Lowell Boileau, is there, too. As usual, Goodfellow is dressed like a Salvation bulky tweed sweater, Army used clothing ad plaid shirt, dungarees, boots. It looks as if he slept in them. His hair is askew and his face is animated, framed by a dark beard as he hops from group to group, bantering, joking, touching. Though of medium height, the adjective which most often springs to mind for Goodfellow is "bearlike."

When Goodfellow came to Detroit in 1975 he lived briefly with the Mielgaards, but quickly

found that Birmingham was not his cup of tea. He met a woman then living in Lowell Boileau's house on Colorado in Highland Park, and moved in shortly afterward. He lived there until mid-1983.

Highland Park is close to Wayne State and Alvin's Deli, where Goodfellow spent time socializing and sifting through academic grit and social grime. (One of his pictures shows the crowd at Alvin's leering, on the make, frenetic, their broadly painted features exploding off the canvas; huge hands in the foreground, a consistent technique appearing in many Goodfellow canvases, threatening to fall off the edge of the painting.)

Two things began to germinate in those first years on Colorado and at Wayne. Before he arrived in America, Goodfellow's work was largely based on "distorted perspectives. I had a fear of rendering the human form," he admits. "And one should always face fears." To deal with that fear, he began to study with WSU's Stanley Rosenthal, a respected printmaker whom Goodfellow found "an exquisite teacher."

The first breakthrough came soon after: Goodfellow says faces began "sneaking in (to my work)." Eventually, says Mary Wright, director of Xochipilli Gallery where Goodfellow has shown his work since 1982, Goodfellow "embraced his experiences" and the human form gradual- ly began to dominate.

In the late '70s, while Goodfellow was setting up in "bastard galleries" ("I'd rent space, fill it up, open, show my work, close down like a phoenix") his collaboration with Lowell Boileau was leading to the second and major breakthrough, a technique known as "primary color gum stencil."

A WARM, SUNNY summer day in Detroit, the backyard of the house on Colorado is alive with activity. Mary Wright hops from group to group, greeting friends, gallery clients, collectors - all potential or returning buyers. She introduces collectors to Detroit Institute of Arts officials, greets newspaper people, hellos the party circuit regulars. Ms. Wright is the unofficial hostess of what is, though partylike in atmosphere, a serious marketing device in Stephen Goodfellow's career: the hosedown.

Some weeks (or months) ago, Goodfellow put a drawing on paper. Then, starting with a bare, white in Goodfellow's case, one as large as 25 square canvas- feet the drawing was transferred to the canvas. Gum arabic was applied to areas which would not receive the first coat of color. Then the first coat of color, yellow, was applied (only the three primary colors known as the - yellow, red and blue- "reflected color" spectrum used). Gum arabic was applied again as yellows were darkened in some areas. Once all yellow tones had been done, the canvas was washed with water and the next layer of gum arabic was applied to block out those areas which would not receive the reds. (The sequence is always yellow, red, blue). This process was continued as layers of color on color merged (blue over red, for instance, equals purple), ending in the final blue stage.

Finally, on this afternoon, the huge painting is placed on an easel in front of the garage. It is mostly blue: beneath the blue surface, figures are barely discernible. As Goodfellow applies water from a garden hose and body English to a sponge, the blue fades and strikingly vibrant colors illuminate the objects and figures on the viewers canvas. There is a small shock, a surprise are caught unaware. This is the moment of birth of a Stephen Goodfellow painting.

Goodfellow refuses credit for inventing the process, handing it instead to his friend Lowell Boileau. It was Boileau's experimenting over the course of two years which led to its discovery, and the perfected process has an inherent drama which Mary Wright readily admits can be used to generate interest and sales. "It's a press gimmick, fabulous," she says.

Ms. Wright remembers her first meeting with Good- fellow in May of 1981; Goodfellow had offered to drive artist Shoshana Gunsberg to the Birmingham gallery. While Ms. Gunsberg and Ms. Wright talked, "Stephen stood in the gallery whistling." He was wearing a tank-top undershirt - he had been painting a house to earn a few bucks - and was dirty and sweaty.

"I was getting the giggles," admits Ms. Wright. "How can this guy be this declasse?"

When Ms. Gunsberg finished, Goodfellow approached Ms. Wright. "You know, you're not so bad," Ms. Wright recalls him saying. "You might want to see my paintings."

"I was fascinated," Ms. Wright admits. "I thought I had a total kook on my hands." Later, while showing his work, a collector came in and bought a painting on the spot. Thus began a successful partnership in the merchandising of Stephen Goodfellow's paintings.

The perfected technique, the intense color, the larger-than-life figures make Goodfellow's work unique. But it is invariably the content which stirs the greatest reaction.

(Images) Photo by STEWART SHEVIN Stephen Goodfellow's Vandals,  Stephen Goodfellow in his studio, surrounded by his work.

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Goodfellow

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Many of Stephen Goodfellow's paintings are peopled by prostitutes, angry or frightened men and women, many of them sexually aroused. Even some of the gentler subjects may be startling.

Ken Grekin, senior vice-president of finance at Alexander Hamilton, owns two Goodfellows (and one Boileau). Osiris Brings Milk domi- nates the living room. In it, the figure of the Egyptian God Osiris, holding a six-pack of milk in one hand, the other hand poised to ring the doorbell, is seen through an open window from inside a house. At the bottom edge of the painting, the two occupants' huge faces are contorted in... disgust? Fear? Shock? If Osiris delivers your milk, will he also collect your soul and take it back to the underworld?

"There is an edge Stephen has of real rabble-rousing," says Ms. Wright. "He'd die if someone could walk into a room and not look at (his painting)."

MANON MEILGAARD likens her son's work to that of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch: "Stephen was an absorber; it shows in his work," she says. "He is not tortured... he is full of bonhomie and goodwill. As a child, he was good-natured but rebellious."

That rebelliousness still permeates many of his canvases. One work, The Last Supper, depicts generals in a war room eating fast foods. ("Whatever else Goodfellow is, he is certainly a first-rate contemporary social satirist," wrote one local art critic in 1972.)

Another Goodfellow work, which hangs in the living room of the Mielgaards' Birmingham home, is called Simon, the Cyrenian, Helps Christ. In it, Christ is seen stumbling under the heavy load of the cross. He is watched by helmeted stormtroopers and bored onlookers one holding a shopper's bag bearing the legend "Buy, Buy, Buy." Christ has three sixes on his shirt collar the sign of the Devil - and is wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. At the interstices of the cross, where normally a nimbus contains Christ's name, there is a happy face with the words "Have a Nice Day." At the other end, Simon is helping Christ by strapping a roller skate to the base of the cross.

But even in his most benign pictures, Good- fellow's early rebelliousness and iconoclasm merge with his deep attraction for the underside of life.

"Stephen absolutely loves Detroit," says his mother. "Detroit, like Hull (England) is decay- ing and that has always trapped his imagination. He thinks life is going on here in a very real way."

Stephen Goodfellow is a guerrilla artist who fights hand-to-hand, in ditches, on the streets. His weapons are canvas, his ammunition is imagery.

Take it, as many do, or leave it, as many may be tempted to do, Stephen Goodfellow's art is spectacular: jumping with color, seething with action, recreating a personal vision of deep, intense pantheism.

In Robert Handley's Waterworks, a documentary film on Goodfellow's and Boileau's work, Goodfellow says: I'm always looking for that point of irritation far on the horizon." And what he does is bring it uncomfortably close to home.