David Goldes, the day after

plate trace David Goldes

water balance David Goldes

I had the distinct pleasure of spending most of Thursday with David Goldes before the lecture he gave for CoPA Thursday night. He is an artist and educator of great curiosity, interest and humor. As with so many of the best artists he was generous with his time, thoughts and process.

His presentation mainly covered two bodies of work Water and Traces. To watch and listen as some artists talk you though their creation of a project or series seems, to me, to be very much like winding yarn. I have the sense of a skein, loose loops with some order but needing to be re-formed. The end (or start) is chosen and then slowly the ball is formed, gathering more and more. The occasional tangle or knot that is worked out and back to the patient rhythm of forming the ball.

There are magical qualities imbued in these pictures that are intended to describe the nature of things but really seem to describe the artist. The Traces work has led to him creating an installation of the actual mesh sculptures, a laboratory setting, but in a closed room viewable only through a small window opening. He is thus able to control the viewpoint of 3 dimensional objects just as a photograph does. This, even though he stated he started making the mesh pieces in order to photograph all sides of an object at once. Fascinating.