A Vision Exam From Joe Goode

In the catalog to the exhibition “Joe Goode,” which opened Sunday at the Orange County Museum of Art, there’s a photograph of the artist at work in his studio.

A big rectangular piece of white paper festooned with bold black markings is laid out flat on a table before him--evidently, one of the extensive series of sumi ink drawings he made in 1991 and 1992.

The 60-year-old artist isn’t holding a sable brush in his hand; instead, Goode wields a plastic spray bottle, with which he seems to be soaking the black ink with showers of water, fuzzing the drawing’s edges and puddling its contours.

The photograph emphasizes a relationship between painter and painting that isn’t much different from, say, auto mechanic and engine, or baker and cake. Painting for Goode is plainly a nuts-and-bolts matter, in which process counts. Today, when black-and-white art usually means text-driven critiques of established social structures--critiques in which the physical art object is held to be of minor concern, if not downright pernicious--Goode’s skillful sumi drawings are frankly old-fashioned.

So is his larger artistic interest. As laid out in the OCMA survey, Goode’s recent art is principally concerned with that complicated perceptual moment when the eye and the mind come together in a struggle to see. Abstract painting--loosely related to, but stylistically very different from, the geometric abstractions of John McLaughlin and John M. Miller--is the vehicle through which he examines the phenomenon.

Goode’s exhibition inaugurates the new galleries at OCMA, a museum formed last year by the tempestuous merger of two small institutions--the Laguna and Newport Harbor art museums. Newport’s existing building has essentially been gutted, its offices and support spaces moved next door into what had been a civic library. As a result, despite a relatively minimal construction cost of about $1.5 million, gallery space has more than doubled (from 6,670 to 15,800 square feet).

Construction was in its finishing stages and gallery installation was still underway during the press preview, but the museum now will have a half-dozen galleries for display of a small portion of its 6,000-work permanent collection, as well as three separate rooms specifically for ceramics, works on paper and installation art. The principal expansion of the building’s footprint came in the addition of a modest (but ever-important) party pavilion.

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The Goode show, which was organized by OCMA curator Bruce Guenther, is not a formal retrospective but instead a survey of the artist’s recent work. It brings together 43 paintings, all but three made since 1985.

Goode works in series. The three earliest paintings are from the so-called Environmental Impact Series, in which canvases painted a solid color were set up outdoors and blasted with a shotgun. The spray of buckshot tore tiny holes in the paintings, sometimes flaking off layers of surface pigment to reveal different colors of underpainting, sometimes shredding the weave of the cotton canvas and exposing the wall behind.

These blasted paintings couldn’t be more plain-spoken. Visually, you regard them in two ways: You look at them; and, layer by layer, you look through them. Clarifying the contradictory experience of simultaneously “looking at” and “looking through” has been Goode’s dual endeavor ever since.

During the past decade he’s done it in a way that is at the very least whimsical. Whether you’re a fan of Modern abstract art or not, most everyone has had the experience of looking at abstract paintings with the assumption that recognizable forms are hidden inside them.

When, rightly or wrongly, you see urban construction sites lurking in the stark and dramatic gashes of black paint in a Franz Kline, or you detect the remnants of luminous windows in the rectangular clouds of hovering color in a Mark Rothko, you are no longer looking at the painting; instead, you are looking through it, discovering (or inventing) associations and networks of relationships that may or may not have been intended.

In his abstract paintings, Goode actively courts that kind of ready association. It’s even spelled out in the series’ titles, which describe forest fires, trees, oceans, waterfalls, tornadoes, ozone and sunspots.

Yet the courtship of imagery never abandons a commitment to the sensuous materiality of painting as an object all its own. In fact, Goode’s strongest works hold the two in something approaching equipoise.

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The large paintings in the Ocean Blue Series (1988-89) are fields of carefully modulated color--a broad palette of blues slipping into bottle greens and inflected with patches of radiant violet--in which feathered brushmarks languorously draw your eye across the canvas. When you slowly start to “look through” these paintings, the experience is one of looking through light-dappled water, as if gazing upward toward the surface of the sea from a submerged vantage.

Unlike Claude Monet’s famous late-paintings of lily ponds, however, where transparency also oscillates with opacity and reflection, nothing in Goode’s illusionistic ocean-pictures is remotely descriptive. The eye just sees carefully modulated fields of voluptuous color; the mind does the rest. The surface of the canvas becomes a space to ponder the perils of our mind-body split.

The Ozone Series (1992-95) emphasizes the chemical interactions of vividly colored paint and assorted liquid thinners, which apparently have been splashed and poured across the canvases. The thinners dissolve oil pigment and--visually--burn holes in the paintings’ surface layers, allowing other colors to bubble through. Deftly evoked is the natural instability of gaseous ozone, which is precariously created by silent electrical discharges in the air.

Ozone is an allotropic form of oxygen, which means that it is capable of existing in more than one form--the way carbon, say, can be charcoal, diamond or lampblack, depending on its context and the forces to which it has been subjected. In these paintings that kind of multiplicity further resonates against the simultaneity of the viewer’s perceptual experience--of “looking at” and “looking through.”

Goode’s paintings are enormously likable, but they tend to be most compelling when they are large. Perhaps it’s because the scale then speaks to the viewer’s entire body, heightening the allusions to landscape. The big paintings carry their own environmental impact.

* Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, (714) 759-1122, through April 13. Closed Mondays.