Art historian and features writer Judith Turner-Yamamoto is based in Washington, DC.

Janis Goodman’s exhaustive exploration of water invites us to slow down and discover the graphic subtleties of this natural element. Recording its ebb and flow, the Washington, DC-based artist notes the slight breeze, the fall of a twig, the shift of tides or her own small momentary interventions in nature. She records these changes in large-scale graphite drawings on paper and square, oil-on-wood paintings where gesture and color are more about her emotional interaction with a place than documentation. They invite us, like Rorschach images, to interact with the work, bringing to it our personal experiences of nature.

In hues of burnt orange and black, the painting Autumn Tide, for example, evokes a transitory moment when the water is both fiery mirror for the beauty of the changing trees and watery grave for a clutch of swirling fallen leaves. Cove Swirl layers the lapping blue of summer twilight with the verdant browns and greens of the water’s under-life.

Goodman, who is most recognizable as an art critic on WETA/public television’s “Around Town,” has taught fine arts at the Corcoran College of Art and Design since 1988.  Her involvement with the outdoors began during childhood summers when, growing up in New York City, her family spent vacations in the Catskill Mountains. Cross-country skiing, hiking and most recently kayaking, are life passions reflected in her work. “There’s a seamlessness between where one’s life ends and one’s art begins,” says the artist.“That has always been the case with my work. It describes my activities and what’s interesting to me.”

Five years ago, Goodman rented a cabin in Deer Isle, Maine, at the edge of a tidal cove, a location that complemented her new interest in kayaking. “When the tide is up, it’s a boathouse. I started to observe, along with all the changes in light and color, those formal things artists notice, how the cove changed with the tides, how the rhythm of the birds was tied to their movement.”  The artist, who had been focusing on tree imagery, was at a point where she was beginning to exhaust the subject.

During her second sojourn in Maine, she began looking at the water as a potential
subject, taking photos while kayaking. “I began thinking about water, its importance in our lives, how much of our lives are informed by water from fresh drinking water to flooding and Katrina, and connections with ecology,”she says. “I started to document how the water moved in and out of the cove with paintings and drawings, looking at it as landscape.”

Inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy, the British environmental sculptor who shapes natural materials such as leaves, stones and snow, Goodman became similarly intrigued with intervening in nature, but without leaving a footprint. She started to interrupt the flow of water by throwing rocks into the cove when the tide would come in, then recording the created splashes in photographs and gestural drawings in graphite and watercolor. The formations and shapes recorded in these images became the basis for more finished drawings and paintings. In these works, the rhythms and patterns of the water’s movement—its waves, swirls, ripples and eddies—are recorded by markings within a single tonal range that are superimposed over a color field.

As Goodman works, she lays one set of marks down on top of another, capturing the movement and mystery of water. Whether her palette is the mix of unexpected mustard and umber in Yellow Splash or midnight blue and yellow in Thrash Splash, her work is ultimately about the ephemeral. Her drawings particularly evidence an ability to capture a watery essence, representing the complexity of the fluid matter through a thousand nuances of gray. 

This past summer in Maine, Goodman turned her attention to the mud flats that appeared when the tide was out. “I first responded to a wedge in the mud made by my kayak,” she recalls. “I started thinking about the mud flat as a big blank canvas. I took sticks, rocks, shells, and started doing pictographic-like drawings in the mud.” With a video camera, she recorded her process, which soon became the basis for a series of large-scale drawings. “As soon as you make a mark or shape, it immediately fills in with water that’s below the surface because the mud is so saturated.  You’re not altering anything,  just imposing yourself in a very benign way.”

During a recent artist residency at St. Mary’s College in southern Maryland, Goodman spent a month kayaking on the St. Mary’s River between the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay. There, she discovered osprey nests on pylons and, fascinated that the birds would build in these spaces, she developed a series of pencil drawings that were shown this spring in the exhibition, “Shifting Waters,” at Washington, DC’s Flashpoint Gallery.

Gestural in approach, they continue the artist’s focus on water in its various forms, exploring the patterns of tides; the movement of water, waterfalls and splashes; and the natural habitats surrounding waterways. In these reductive works, as in her earlier paintings, there is no frame of reference; we’re never shown the edge of the cove or the environment around the osprey nest. Instead, her energetic overlapping strokes of graphite invite us to experience something more immediate and essential.