Art Reviews

COVER STORY

BY BILL HOGG

TECHNOSTRUCTURES AND FANTASYSCAPES

Diego Rivera meets Ernie Pook's Comeek in the mad visions of local artist Stephen Goodfellow.

ouched with mad, otherworldly visions of savage beauty and wild color,

Stephen Goodfellow creates mystic pic- tures of raw power that seep into your eyes and refuse to leave. His canvases reflect an arcane knowledge, a super- natural call from a twisted cosmic muse that injects his paintings with magical new perspectives on this mundane world.

Diego Rivera meets "Ernie Pook's Comeek" in Goodfellow's pictures. Faces are grotesque and bloated, yet carefully rendered with a painstaking detail that keeps them from crossing the border into surrealism. Landscapes and backgrounds range from high-tech, sci-fi technostructures to haunting fantasyscapes. A huge, eye-catching work on the wall of his studio depicts a man strumming a guitar, illuminated by the glow from a seething volcano behind him. "Science Without Humanity," one of a series of canvases based on Mahatma Gandhi's Seven Deadly Sins, juxtaposes a realistically ren- dered cigarette smoker with stark images of futuris- tic storm troopers and sterile buildings.

Goodfellow's style jars the viewer from safe com- placency, demanding an intricate relationship with the image. Bright, vibrant colors leap off the canvas and demand your attention. Images which seem innocently simple at first glance become subtly dis- turbing when viewed at length. Shadows seem to grow, colors shift almost imperceptively, intriguing the eye, pulling you into the canvas. Other pictures entrance you with their weirdness, like the piece that shows two people watching a plane crash on television, unaware that they are caught in a strange test pattern of alternating colors.

"The Seven Deadly Sins," perhaps Goodfellow's signature piece, is currently on display as part of the show at the Michigan Gallery. Based on Gandhi's "Seven Deadly Sins" (culled, oddly enough, from a recent Ann Landers column), the canvases are linked by themes of excess and immorality. Individually stunning, together the seven canvases make an overpowering statement about humanity's dark underbelly. For the record, the seven sins are politics without principle, worship without sacrifice, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, wealth without character, science without humanity and commerce without morality.

These stark and vivid images come from parts unknown. "I dig down deep inside of me and things happen very spontaneously," explains Goodfellow. "Very little planning goes on in terms of the image itself. It's very subliminal.

"When people come up to me and say, 'Oh, Stephen, I really like that picture, it really is the most incredible picture,' I almost find myself saying.

wealth without character

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Cover Story Continued from p. 23

I didn't do it.' You release this beast inside of you, this very creative energy. You have to let it out on a leash. You can't release it entirely because It's too extreme. It couldn't be accepted in society in its own right.

Goodfellow is one of the leaders of a pack of polit ically vocal maverick artists from the wilds of Cass Corridor Ditching established art forms for more personalized techniques, this group of artists is responsible for much of the innovation that sets the Detroit art scene apart. Their work is infused with an unmistakable political ethic.

"This is the kind of city where you've got nothing to lose in being an artist," observes Goodfellow. "You can do anything you want here. You don't have to worry about your reputation because no one cares anyway. I think a lot of artists really don't give a shit what Art News or Art Forum says is the main- stream of art. Detroit has a wellspring of its own. and it comes from here, and it's unique."

Working from this environment of experimental- Ism, with everything to gain and nothing to lose, Goodfellow co-parented the Micropointillism tech- nique, a form unique in its use of layered microdots of primary colors.

Goodfellow comes to Detroit through a circuitous route which circles the globe. Although born in South Hampton, England, he spent most of his younger years in Nigeria, Copenhagen and Mexico. While a teenager in Mexico, his mother gave him his first nudge toward the art scene. "I was a particu- larly lousy student," he recalled. "My mom knew I was good at artwork and stuff... I owe her a great debt of gratitude for wangling me into art college in

England, even though I was grossly underage. I was 15 at the time."

He attended East Ham Technical College in London, followed by a three-year stint at Hull College of Art in northern England. After graduat- Ing. he returned to Denmark for a brief time, but found that he had outgrown what he saw as the sexually progressive but emotionally constipated attitudes that prevailed there. When his stepfather migrated to America to take a position at Stroh Brewery (he developed the formula for Signature beer), Goodfellow soon followed, moving to Detroit and copping his MA from Wayne State University. It was love at first sight.

"Boy, I liked it a lot down here. There was a lot of camaraderie in the art world that I had never experlenced before in England or Denmark or anywhere. It was something new to me."

Goodfellow's interests are as varied as his back- ground. He's an oddball, eclectic sort who defies pigeonholing. Although best known for his innova- tive art stylings, he is also a musician and dabbles in astrophysics. He's never at a loss for words. Start a conversation on any subject, and he will be sure to finish it. He is supremely vocal on the subject of politics, especially the politics of art.

"Detroit suffers from a cultural inferiority complex. At the apex of this inferiority complex, and I target it in my mind, is the DIA (Detroit Institute of Arts), which looks for culture in Chicago, in New York, in Los Angeles, and for as long as I've lived here, totally ignored their own art scene in a major way."

the DIA's misguided lead. Patrons who should spend their money on works by Detroit artists, he asserts, instead make their purchases out of town. often settling for work that is inferior and less ener getic. As a result, many artists leave Detroit to head for greener pastures.

For a brief period, he was one of them. Having watched all the "Kick Out the Jams" artists pack their brushes and shuffle off to New York. Goodfellow followed suit. What he found was a city full of relocated artists who, broken and disen- chanted by the huge, competitive monster that is the New York City art scene, had forsaken their art for the drudgery of 9-to-5 survival. Undaunted, Goodfellow held out until he got a gallery to exhibit his work, a disappointing show that "gave me every justification for leaving."

He returned to Detroit with a fresh outlook on the city's art community. "I now realize that the art scene here is much more lively than it is in Chicago or New York. It's not so small that it's inbred, and it's not so large that you can't see its horizon line." But the battle with the DIA continues. In the front lines is the Coalition of Artist Rabble (CAR), a group of fed-up artists, including Goodfellow, united for a single purpose. "We've got to make that institution over there start to pay tribute to artists in Detroit. Either they've got to start looking, or we've got to chuck them," says Goodfellow.

Goodfellow may take a break from his brushes. but never from his opinions. When he's not painting, he sings lead vocals for the Layabouts, the popular band he started a few years back with Alan and Ralph Franklin, who he met while working for

Goodfellow accuses local collectors of following Stephen Goodfellow, co-parent of Micropointillism, at work atop his studio.

Metro Times Photos/Dan Danilowicz

*****

The Fifth Estate. "They were radical assholes, and initially I couldn't stand them," he remembers, "but Just by meeting them again and again, I got to like them.
They denounced the music that flooded the airwaves as pure trash, regarding the premier alternative-punk rock-as sheer aggression with little beauty. Envisioning music with a message to which "you could dance your feet off," they formed the Layabouts, an anarchistic rock and roll band cited as one of the best in the city."The message the Layabouts puts across is nonservient. Thou shalt not obey," explains Goodfellow. "You can cooperate. but you should never obey. When you start obeying people, you end up with a circumstance like the Nuremburg trials.

"You are ultimately responsible for your own actions. Every human being is responsible, and you should not surrender yourself to what seemingly is an authoritarian circumstance. You have to have your own soul intact whenever you go into something."

Recently, the Layabouts softened the sharp edges of their act, sprinkling some standards among the original material and changing their name to the Acoustabouts. The spirit of rock and revolution, however, remains central to the group.

Neutrinos fascinate Goodfellow. In his rare free moments, he pursues the study of astrophysics with the same passion he lends to his art. He was bitten by the physics bug while lying in a bathtub reading an account of the Voyager space probe's close encounter with Jupiter. Since then, he has furiously studied astronomy at WSU, and pestered professors at the University of Michigan, MIT and Harvard with his theories about neutrinos and the possibility of creating artificial gravity. His findings are meticulously compiled in an unpublished paper entitled "Can Gravity Be Induced-Observational Evidence and Verifiable Proof for a Dynamic GRAVAC Sun," which he quickly presents upon even the slightest sign of interest.

Strangely, Goodfellow's ultimate high comes from a source other than art, music, politics or science. "The highest joy I get is talking to friends. In those moments when there is real energy going, it is the nectar of life. I would set aside fortune and fame for those moments when you're sitting and having an animated conversation with the people you're close to... or total strangers who sometimes come into your life and they have ideas that just make your mind pop. It's the greatest drug there is on Earth."

Detroit-based freelance writer Bill Hogg is a regular contributor to the Metro Times.

SPLASHDOWN

o celebrate the opening of their "Micropoint- illism 88" exhibition, the Michigan Gallery staged yet another memorable bash, complete with the upbeat sounds of the Acoustabouts, and Jitterbug Jones and the Jumpin' Jive.

Inside, a huge concord of people milled around galleries hung with brilliantly colored canvases by Detroit artists in a variety of styles ranging from fig- urative to abstract. Outside, another group of spec- tators stood against a natural-weather, but theatri- cally dramatic backdrop of stormy clouds and gusty winds, while one by one, artists propped their can- vases against a wall and deliberately doused them with rapid bursts of water from a hose. Casual observers of this somewhat weird scenario might be right in thinking that a bunch of artistic crazies were hell-bent on annihilating their own creations, but not so! The hosing, or splashdown process, is an integral part and the finale of the micropoint process.

The history of micropoint is a fascinating one. In the Paris art world of the late 19th century, Georges Seurat, the young Neo-Impressionist, amazed and sometimes offended the public with canvases paint- ed with a technique he and others called pointil- lism. Scientific in theory, and yet poetic in practice. pointillism was, and still is, a method in which a

white ground is systematically covered with tiny points of pure primary colors-yellow, red and blue-that blend together when seen from a dis- tance, producing a luminous effect.

Almost a century later, two young Detroit artists, Stephen Goodfellow and Lowell Boileau, perfected and developed a similar method called micropoint or micropointillism, where the dots of primary color are reduced to microscopic size by atomizing or spray- ing a thin layer of acrylic paint. For their method, they borrowed ideas and techniques from printing. conventional painting, silkscreening and airbrush- ing.

Briefly put, a preliminary drawing is made on a white gessoed canvas. Shades of yellow are built by successively spraying yellow paint and blocking out areas with water soluble screen masking. The paint- ing is then hosed with water, dissolving the mask and leaving an image in shades of yellow. The pro- cess is repeated with tones of red applied upon the yellow base, and the painting is hosed again, reveal- ing an image in yellow, reds and oranges. Blue is then applied, and dissolving away the mask with a third hosing unveils the three-color painting with varying secondary colors.

This last part is pure show biz. The third image is a murky, purplish, indecipherable daub before the final hosing; as parts of the surface begin to dissolve and stream down the canvas in dirty trickles of water, bursts of brilliant color and light begin to appear-the picture is born with the instantaneity of a polaroid print, but in a far more exciting display. At this point, the artists like to flourish pocket microscopes before the eyes of bemused beholders. No matter how many hues appear in the painting. and even though the method may provide a wide spectrum of colors, the viewer will see only micro- scopic dots of yellow, red and blue scattered upon a Micropointilist field of white. These little dots seen under microscope retain their autonomy, like notes in music. giving the picture a grainy texture even at a distance.

Sixteen artists are participating in the exhibition, which is curated by Boileau and Goodfellow. Boileau explained that the event has the dual pur- pose of sharing the technique with other interested artists, combined with an educational exercise to show how diversely the method can be employed. For many of the artists, micropoint is a new tech- nique they have been working on for less than a year. Goodfellow, who has taught micropoint at Wayne County Community College and the Michigan Gallery, said that several students con- quered the technique in a matter of a few months or even weeks. As an example, watercolorist Trisha Kniffen produced seven dazzling contemporary studies incorporating dimension, pattern and shad- ow after a three-hour crash course.

Together with Goodfellow's "The Seven Deadly Sins" and others, Boileau is represented by no less than 17 pieces, including scenes of Detroit where he softens urban decay with subtle light and glow- ing colors. His huge, approximately 10' x 6' canvas of passengers in the People Mover looking down upon a tilted perspective of vertical buildings and almost arrogant giant-size cars is magnificent.

Other innovative paintings with decidedly per- sonal styles are Brewster Luttrell's contemplative heads which recall the Italian Quattrocento. John Nagridge's "Death Mask" and "Snowman" are stun- ning, as are some of Sandy Zenisek's interiors, and a colorful, many-faceted intaglio by Margaret McGuiness originating from the three primary col- ors was the inspiration for Goodfellow and Boileau's research into micropoint painting.

The "beginning artists in the micropoint tech-88

Michigan Gallery

Unique make valuable contributions in terms of diversity and freshness. Ricardo Maldonado's skull figures and masks seem to reflect the Mexi- can festival "Day of the Dead," and Denice Rankin's studies are vibrant primitives-some with a distinctly Carib- bean flavor. Others are Lori Scott's exquisite "Chairs" and "Splash," Irene Piazza's vivid, impressionistic still lifes, Sandra Kassa's well- compositioned sailing boat and her goldfish pieces, Lynn Sable's quizzical, juxtaposed "Twins," Susan Bernard's patterned American-Indian motif "Pow," Sandra Muck's delightful parrot's head, and Elnora Morris' Japanese-like triptych.

A small information center in the gallery houses a pocket micro- scope, and historical and pertinent details of the micropoint process.

-Manon Meilgaard

The exhibition con- tinues until Oct. 29 at the Michigan Gallery, 2661 Michigan Ave., Detroit. For information, call 961-7867. A signed, limited edition of the micropointillist lithograph print/- poster by Stephen Goodfellow will be available throughout the run of the show.

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