BETSY GOLDBERG

STATEMENT

With light, color and animated drawing, or mark making, i strive to capture the feeling of a moment in space and time. Generally, then, I am a landscape artist.

That landscape work usually explores relationship between Nature and the Built Environment: roof tops against sky, people against planes of buildings or streets, roads cutting through nature, people in subways, or on manmade beaches.

These moments include the moving against the stationary. Light and shade on the static planes and vigorously drawn figures vitiate the right angle tyranny of the urban settings.

Too, the movement of figures and vehicles, of the nearby river, of planes in the sky, versus that which seems staionary, suggests the corollary relationship of matter and energy. Nice to be able to translate energy into form in Art.

Ultimately it is my wish to create beauty and evocative works in which people recognize moments in their own experience of the world.

BIOGRAPHY

I was born in the country, on the remains of the family farm, which fronted on a main road running from the border of the Bronx straight to White Plains, the Westchester county seat. The back half had been sold to NYC for the building of the Catskill aqueduct, NY’s water supply. My first sense of space, then was nature, about five acres, the
front, on the highway, sloping up to this man made earthen wall, reached by old stone-alled tunnel, with a one lane dirt road on top. I wandered freely, sought out the foundations of the old barn, and remember drawing the silo’s cement circle, and surrounding wall, not too high. This description explains some of the solitary freedom, awareness of space, near, with distance views, endless path in one direction, and from the waterpump house, a glimpse of the top of the GW Bridge. The approach was an old hairpin farm road, with stone walls gong from the low, to the high. Beyond and above all this was the vast sky, sometimes seen in bright patches through foliage of trees, patterned spaces. I drew lots of trees. It seems that this place and solitary, often intense, apprehending it, feeling wonder, is the basis of my artist's calling.
Landscape, space, nature bordered by the man made, the built environment.

After the Korean War with the military understanding of President Eisenhower, and the builder Robert Moses, great roads were built from New York up into Wetchester and beyond, i.e. the NYState Thruway, Major, Deagan and Sprain Brook, and East-West, the Cross Bronx, Cross County and eventually the Cross Westchester Expressway, and the Tappan Zee Bridge. I was fascinated by the lines on the map. It brought the suburban boom, the mushrooming spread of tract houses, everywhere. My own ‘paradise was encroached upon, the pond on Central Avenue, (Route 100) was filled, the willow trees torn out. The road, widened, widened again. I drew upturned tree roots, my high school friends tell me. So this elemental relationship, or confrontation, Nature and the built environment, became my underlying and overreaching subject, theme, which i am exploring and expressing still.

There were early Art classes with a nearby artist who did spots for the New Yorker, sculpture classes up at the County Center,Under ten, I did figures in clay, one, I see now, took a pose from an Art deco ashtray, another, a torso, no arms, legs, or head, no model, hefty, dubbed by my mother’Horso Torso.’ I won a prize in a local Women’s club show. And I kept drawing. I chose colleges with high standing, great liberal Arts, and access to Art study,I was schooled at Skidmore, in marvelous Saratoga Springs, who’s houses, parks, racetracks delight me. Good Art History, Albers’ color course, rigorous Yale drawing from a fine teacher, good Artist, too. .It was a girl’ school then, maintaining a certain freedom in the classroom. I was confirmed in my abilities, growing skills. A budding Artist, but not into the ‘career’.

Teaching in New York’s public schools gave me deep education in real politic, racism, and made me give form to my ideas, and communicate the excitement, of looking, seeing, understanding, the nature, shape, color of the visual world. The students ‘got it!’ When I began at the High School of Music and Art, I headed the Printmaking Studio,
and was also hired to teach Art History and started the Advanced Placement class. In painting and Drawing classes, I often worked in class with the students, as well as circulating. It was terrific. After school I would go to my studio, nap , and work ’til dinner. There were summer fellowships, Summer Six, at Skidmore, at the Vermont Studio Center, The Virginia Center, and residencies at Byrdcliffe above Woodstock, at Palenville’s InterArts Colony. and Merit Scholarships to the Art Student’s League, and a residence at Cooper Union for a summer. Aside from developing skills and practice, I was not yet ’formed’ in deeply developed exploration. I needed to stop teaching. I did so.

I moved to Manhattan in 1967, and became a landscape painter of the urban, the populated. Nature and the built environment up close. When healing from hip surgery, I worked from the roof of my apartment building, capturing weather, time of day, light, from the high vantage point. The Hudson River dominated, its reflective moving horizontal force visible in several direction, along with the Palisades, and the hint of the extensive continent. The buildings,(how to paint them? Suggestively!) punctuate and articulate the space, markers of human life. The water towers seem as analogs of the human body, and presence.

Other bodies of work get closer, humans on the sidewalks, cars in the streets, echoing the river’s flow, reflecting light, and movement. The Geometry of the intersections fascinates, complex shapes made by strong lines, and presence of both people and vehicles. The physical compositional possibilities are endless, as are the emotional states engendered by the interaction. A stage for the intense compacted movements of people, buildings, vehicles, close up, with cut off forms, the larger scenes of crossing , passing.

Of late I’ve painted expansive skies, looking up, framed by the edges of buildings in changing light and referring to the tyrant of the right angle here.

There have been many shows since the early seventies, in and around NY, other parts of the country and abroad. Some with groups, And many solo exhibits as well. Not in the ‘fast lane’, but varied venues, .In more than thirty private collections, but, not established in the commercial market. Mixed feelings about that. The time now, my time, is precious. The time to market…the desire to commodify meets resistance within. In this young country Art has been treated as commodity, or earlier, ‘Self-expression. Not the deep expression of values, of investigation into the structure and meaning of life here, of the cosmos, of the human condition. I love it when someone ‘gets’ my work and wants one!
But it’s not the Goal. Growing into deeper and better expression of the essence of it all is the goal. I continue.

I have made no mention of the struggles to pursue this path, sacrifices, or challenges. That is another part of the story. Enough for now.

- Betsy Goldberg October 2019