Betty Goodwin
Sable-Castelli Gallery
Betty Goodwin’s drawings explore the physical parameters of gesture, both real and imaginary. Working with wax, pigment, and ash, Goodwin creates life-size figures that seem to hover on enormous sheets of translucent vellum. Her characters are remote and faceless, caught between human presence and absence. She takes full liberty to remove a limb or extend the significance of a movement through repeated layers of opalescent color. In drawings such as Figure with Megaphone, 1988, the individual forms entwine themselves in a multiplicity of arm and leg movements that offer few clues. By stripping