In the Heart of an Artist…

 

Professor Robert Godfrey (Art) received national and international recognition this last year both as an artist and as a teacher. Godfrey, who has been teaching Art at WCU since 1985, had four museum exhibits, three national and one international, and taught classes in painting as a Visiting Artist in Provence, France and at the Art School in Hamburg, Germany. A graduate of Indiana University Graduate School of Fine Arts, Mr. Godfrey currently serves as Chair of the Art Department at WCU, as well as Coordinator of Graduate Programs in Art; he also teaches painting courses to undergraduate Art majors at WCU. Mr. Godfrey describes himself as a "romantic painter" whose themes involves love relationships and love themes. His painting Rekindling the Fire, from his Fire Series, was exhibited at the National Academy Museum in New York City during April as part of an invitational group exhibition. His landscape painting, Leesburg Falls, was acquired as part of The State Museum of Pennsylvania's permanent collection and was exhibited this spring as a new acquisition. Mr. Godfrey also had his Ten Big Pictures exhibited at the Greenville, North Carolina Art Museum from March to May. Love Stories, a series of 250 12x12 inch paintings, was exhibited in Hamburg, Germany at Galerie en Passent from May 27 to July 1, the exhibit being extended for two additional weeks after its originally planned June 23 closing. Love Stories, all oil on linen paintings, reveals 10 years of work from which Godfrey pulled 250 paintings out of a couple of thousand paintings which he felt best lived up to his overall theme of love. Some paintings come from his Fire Series, some from his 500 Works exhibited at The Butler Institute of Art in Ohio in 1992, some from his Chicken Alley Wedding Series exhibited in 1996-97, and some from a series of unexhibited works he produced in New York City in 1995.

Godfrey's paintings often use both fire and water as central metaphors to portray the complex interactions within couples and freindships, the interactions between individuals revealing a "universal sense of compassion within humanity." While each painting in Love Stories can be viewed as a separate piece, all of the paintings work together as a large group to portray the complexity of experiences within relationships. Godfrey often repeats a scene in a variety of ways using color, scale, or gestural changes to explore a moment or incident more thoroughly. The paintings, painted more from the imagination than from life, are typical of his style which has been described by a number of art critics as "Neo-Expressionist." And while many of his paintings are historically referenced in artistis such as Tintoretto, El Greco or Late Renaissance or Mannerist artists in general, Godfrey translates certain gestural archetypes and figures loosely and "painterly," rather than replicating classical composition and detail. In the classroom, Godfrey teaches through analogy, helping students understand artistic technique and types of form. He uses, for example, Gaston Bachelard's books, Poetics of Space and Psychoanalysis of Fire, to encourage students to view works of art and architecture not as illustrations but as metaphors. Mr. Godfrey has been working this past year on Points on a Compass, a 30-painting series based on geographical locations (North, South, East, and West) and integrating images and metahpors of the seasons and age; in this series he is also expanding his palette to a fuller range of hues and pigments. A tentative solo exhibition is planned at the Zone One Gallery in Asheville, NC next spring.