Marla Goodman
Artist Statement
I come from a world of beautiful, ordinary, safe things. I grew up in a rural area south of Bozeman, a fourth generation Montanan. After my dad retired from the Navy in 1969, Mom and Dad resettled the family in Montana. They bought an old farm house where we lived out a 1970s version of an idyllic pastoral life.
My lifestyle there included half-heartedly weeding the garden, gathering eggs, picking berries, watching Six Million Dollar Man-era TV shows, reading, listening to The Beatles and The Monkees, singing, playing guitar, throwing rocks in the creek, fishing, swimming, building forts, making mud pies, tagging along on trips to town (Bozeman’s trendiest boutique, Jay’s Hallmark, had exotic things like strawberry lip balm) and waiting at the Buttrey’s fountain counter with a lemon Coke while Mom did the grocery shopping.
My sisters, brother and I spent hours around the kitchen table, talking and playing games after meals that came straight from the Betty Crocker cookbook (interspersed with handed-down recipes for venison, trout and grouse). We considered store-bought foods to be a delicacy, with Pop Tarts being the ultimate. Since my dad was an electronics specialist, we weren’t really farmers or ranchers, and I envied our neighbors, who were the real thing. While we were listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Prima on Dad’s reel to reel tape machine, they were listening to Tammy Wynette and Tom T. Hall on the radio.
My favorite activities were reading, drawing and riding horses. While my sisters played pinochle with Mom and Dad, I would entertain myself, using library books as reference, to draw horses on the same freezer paper that Mom used for wrapping deer steaks. Those days, I would draw anything just for the thrill of seeing what my pencil could reproduce: beer bottles, cigarette packages, pictures from magazines, anything that would sit still long enough for me to examine its form and shadows.
At some point I lost interest in drawing for the sake of drawing, though. Growing up in my rural Montana bubble, I was shocked to discover that not everything was pinochle, horses and berry pies. Awareness crept in. The angst of the nuclear age weighed on me. I began to feel obligated to look for subjects that told some kind of truth.
As a young teen, my truths were dramatic (on paper, I drowned Ophelias by the swarm). Later they became more mundane (my interest in painting shirts and bathrobes compelled my advisor, at Montana State University, Hal Schlotzhauer, to guess I was copying Jim Dine, though I hadn’t, until then, heard of him).
Lately, my subjects tend to combine aspects nostalgia and peril. As much as I love landscapes (in fact, I tend to buy a lot of them) I never really feel like they tell the whole truth. I feel like around the corner from every beautiful, safe thing is something frightening or depressing. My sister, Jana, always says, “If I could draw, I’d draw nice things! Can’t you just paint something pretty?” I can, sometimes I try, but… those little flames of worry keep sneaking in.
So I give you Fire. The subject satisfies my craving for a peaceful lost world, but the truth is… I just seem to want to paint things on fire. Ironically, for a person who avoids excitement in general, I’ve always loved fire.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there’s something symbolic going on in this theme. People posing with oblivious smiles while danger lurks all around them… How can they not see it? Is it possible that they don’t even notice?
Maybe this comes across as a sophomoric fancy, like when 5th graders go through a stage of drawing plane crashes. But this is the way I really see the world: beautiful and ordinary, yes, but also confusing, weird and scary.