Sold for $37,500

Provenance:
The Studio of Joe Goode, Los Angeles

Exhibited:
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, The Oklahoma Art Center, Joe Goode/Jerry McMillan/Edward Ruscha, July 14-September 3, 1989; Orlando, Florida, Orlando Museum of Art, September 24-December 3, 1989

Literature:
Hopkins, Henry T. & Sue, Scott, Joe Goode/Jerry McMillan/Edward Ruscha, The Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, p. 32 (illustrated)

Lot Essay:
Oklahoma born Joe Goode followed childhood friend and fellow artist Ed Ruscha to California, where he first received international acclaim in 1962 with his inclusion in Walter Hopps’ historic survey of Pop Art, New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum and an Artforum cover selection of a representative Milk Bottle painting. Goode is frequently associated with the West Coast Light and Space Movement for his shared concerns with perception and environment, though something of an artistic shapeshifter, with his explorative versatility and straddling of abstract and representational approaches, the work itself often runs contrary to continued critical classification. Vision and sight lines, in and out of and more specifically important through the presupposed picture plane is a principle interest and conceptual constant in all of Goode’s work. Through each successive series, Goode visually contradicts expectations of transparency and opacity, from the obscured and subsumed milk bottles, to the shredded surfaces of his torn clouds, to the buckshot perforation arrangements of environmental impact, sublimely surprising and shocking the presumed eye experience. 

Forest Fire #97, 1984 is a seminal painting from Goode’s series of the same name, a substantial triptych cleverly composed of chaotic orange, yellow, gray and black scrawling movements of paint, the work is excitingly both a vibrant color field abstraction and a realistic rendering of consuming flames. Smoke and mirrors, illusionistic in every sense, the very content and construction of the painting challenge what it is exactly that we see. Like the Torn Cloud and Environmental Impact works, by capturing static moments of violent action or activity, in the Forest Fire series Goode transmutes devastating destruction into creative beauty, aesthetic alchemy. The magic of the metamorphic process of wood burning, from solid matter, to combusting energy, to dissipating ash and disappearing smoke, all phases can be seen at once on the canvases, a slight of hand and a sight to behold. Forest Fire #97 was significantly loaned by the artist as an indicative example of  this important body of work to the heroic homecoming 1989 exhibition at the Oklahoma Art Center, Joe Goode/Jerry McMillan/Edward Ruscha, celebrating and displaying three Sooners who staked their claims in the art world firmly.