About Me
Hello. My name is Mark Goodbaum. I live in Toronto. I started as a maker 30 years ago producing decorative screens, and wooden sculptures . Those pieces were made with reclaimed wood and upended roots harvested from the forest. I incorporated crafting practice into a modernist aesthetic, but as I sorted through the organic forms and broke them down, I began to identify abstract shapes within the organic objects and my perspective changed. My crafting practice morphed into constructing visual art using both the organic and abstract shapes that had revealed themselves to me and with the introduction of colour, I morphed from being a maker into a visual artist.
I had intended to pursue formal art education in 2019 upon my retirement from Family Medicine, but COVID [as it did to all of us] , changed that trajectory. My curiosity and interest was instead channelled into more of the self-learning and experimentation that I had already embarked on for many years. The clarity gained from that exploration led me to retrospectively investigate and understand how my love of landscape and classic modernism , is the inspiration for my images.
My paintings are colourful expressions of geometric and abstract forms. It is my intention to have colour, line, and shape, all articulate with one another until balanced and suspended in space. I aim for the artwork to be active, yet peaceful in its unity. There is often a grid pattern initially laid down, with multiple shapes then added. I create a flow to the piece by interrupting the grid using line, plane, curve, repetition, light, dark, and colour...always colour. I do not sketch on the board, rather I cut out shapes , moving them about to set the composition according to a dynamic scale that I desire. I use ink, pencil, charcoal, high grade latex and acrylic paints, fine art paper, dried flowers, and bark, all on birch board that has had a frame built into the edging. No additional framing is required. The pieces are usually sealed with acrylic resin, which provides a clear, glossy, long-lasting, non-yellowing finish.
My sculpture is a very different aesthetic. I use wood, rebar, metal, and concrete fragments. I reorient them , shaping a reinvented, renewed organic form. To further naturalize its presentation I use paint and momigami to soften its appearance and texture. Momigami is a paper treated with Konnyaku starch that makes it highly flexible , with a fabric like texture and is classically used for clothing, and is highly durable. I seal the rebar with metal resin, and the concrete with acrylic resin , giving the assemblage a finished purposeful look.