Description

Robert Arthur Goodnough was a color field painter.  The earliest Color Field artists achieved a more pure abstraction by abandoning all suggestion of figuration—but even more, they sought to evoke the expression of color by deploying large fields of color that would envelope the viewer when seen at close quarters.  Goodnough, though, deployed color in a kinetic manner, fragmented and moving, evocative of Georges Bracques’ birds. His work used calligraphy, intense splashes of primary color, and repeated motion. This work was commissioned for the 1976 Montreal Olympics.