GERRY GOODPASTURE - Artist Profile / Statement

For as long as I can remember, I knew I could draw what I see - and do it quite well. And like every artist, I started with portraits and landscapes. For me, growing up in the small Oklahoma town of Hennessey, opportunities to develop my artistic ability came from home more often than in school or other social environments. Having a mother who is an artist was the best encouragement I ever received. Without the availability of a high school art program, I found myself developing a passion for the art of the written word in classical English and contemporary American literature. Not suprisingly, in the course of choosing a college focus, I elected to study literature and creative writing. While acquiring my degree in English Literature at Oklahoma State University in 1995, I veered off my major and enrolled in what has become the one and only professionally taught art class in my life.

After graduating, I was faced with the two choices all artists have in their lives, make art for someone else and earn a living, or make art for yourself and pray you don't starve. I chose to earn a living. From 1996 until 2001, I worked for Precious Moments, Incorporated in Carthage, Missouri, first as a stained-glass artist before settling in as a graphic designer and art projects coordinator. I designed products, catalogs, and marketing materials while managing hundreds of other art related projects until I hit what I like to term the "wall of technology." My end products reflected more on the marvel of the electronic media I used to produced them, not my artistic ability and direction. The processes of graphic design, however, ignited a fascination with color - how colors are produced and how color relationships form images. In the end, the deceptive capabilities of Photoshop and the every day fight to create the perfect digital color of orange sent me searching for my paint brush.

Continuing my career travels East on 1-44 in 2003, I trained in retail management in Springfield, Missouri with Pier 1 Imports and landed in St. Louis for a year and a half. On days away from the store, I visited the St. Louis Art Museum gravitating toward the works of the abstract expressionists Kline, Pollock, and Rothko. After dozens of trips to view their works, I began painting more abstractly with single strokes of paint. I wanted to know how much could be achieved with one stroke of the brush, and what could hundreds of those single strokes come together to form, even with their singularity remaining evident?

Before my time with Pier 1 came to an end in Tulsa in 2005, I met Mark Hawley and Christine Booth at Hawley Design Furnishings who encouraged me to show my work in their gallery. Having returned to Oklahoma, I resettled to where I call home in the Eastern part of the state on Grand Lake. I rejoined my partner in business with Serenity Point, and put to use the home studio we had begun buiding two years prior. Today, when I paint, I bring thoughts of spiritual meditation and levels of human conciousness into play, but the overall of effect of my work is a simple joy of color. I continue to work with single strokes of paint combining moments of chaos and order, as well as progressing an idea of pulling back the "veil" of how paintings are made by creating finished works that appear raw and exposed.