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Jim Goodall has lived and worked
in Hanoi since early 2000 producing a series of paintings that are a chronicle
of his journey of discovery of Vietnam - its people, symbols and culture.
Unlike many artists depicting the street scenes or landscapes of Vietnam,
he has adopted a more intriguing approach. He picks out the essential details
of everyday life reflected by natural and organic elements; beautiful in
their simplicity they bring him to the heart of Vietnamese life. Using the
device of frame-within-a-frame he carefully arranges figurative elements
on a background of large, semi-abstract compositions creating windows through
which the viewer is drawn into the essential ‘story’ of the
painting..
Much of his work is on locally produced hand-made paper from the bark of
the Do tree, traditionally used for block prints in Vietnam. His technique
is deliberately simple: acrylic on large canvases or Do paper; where paint
is slashed on with a palette knife; some slashes are softened by brush or
roller then glazed to give depth and often mystery and ambiguity; like the
associations found in a Rorschach ink-blot test. Images are then picked
out and consolidated by extraordinarily detailed brush and pen work. He
says: “Hopefully I have been able to achieve a balance between image
and technique, between what I want to say and the technique which enables
me to say it. When both factors are in harmony there’s a sense of
wholeness and the work is finished.” |
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He has produced some of his
best work in the ‘Series’ paintings: ‘The Burned Book
Series’; ‘The Hanoi Series’ and the ‘GV Notebook
Series’ and recently ‘The New Hanoi Series – the People.’
Each series explores a train of thought, for example, in the Burned Book
Series he examines the ambiguity of destruction, where the act of destruction,
though ugly, its aftermath has an awesome beauty reminding us that ultimately
everything belongs to the organic cycle of life and death. In the GV Notebooks
series he uses the ravages of time on surfaces together with images from
the quixotic nature of memory, He says: “I’ve tried to fix
a thought, stop the clock on paper or canvas and record an image caught
in the churn of time.”
Both ‘The Hanoi Series” (2004-5) and the ‘New Hanoi
Series- the People’ ( 2007) are chronicles of coming to terms with
a his surroundings, the people and the culture of the country he has chosen
as his base, on the one hand a here-and-now personal diary of life in
Vietnam and on the other a journey into Asian philosophy and Vietnamese
culture expressed as pages torn from the illustrated diaries an imaginary
European adventurer traveling in Asia in the years before photography
recording both Vietnam’s past and Vietnam now.
Susanne Lecht, Director, Art Vietnam Gallery, Hanoi
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