Moving Towards Fire 1983

Betty Goodwin’s Swimmers series, 1982–88, from which this work is taken, marked an important transition from a phase of producing installations to creating large-scale drawings, which became her primary medium over the next few decades. In this image, and indeed throughout this series, the figure is suspended, afloat in undetermined space. Notably absent in much of her work since the late 1960s, the figure reappears here in lifelike scale. Both the title and the disposition of the body in this work anticipated the largest of the drawings she executed directly on walls two years later in the 1985 Aurora Borealis exhibition, which featured installations by artists from across Canada.

Goodwin’s subject matter originated in an unforgettable incident some years earlier involving her husband, Martin, in which he nearly drowned. However, Goodwin’s swimmer works transcend this emotionally fraught personal memory to embody an existential condition of struggle for survival as well as the fragility and transience of life. Often repeating or reconsidering lines, as she does in many of her swimmer drawings, Goodwin reinforces the sensation of bodies struggling to stay afloat in the water that engulfs them. “I see swimmers in a condition under water where, out of necessity, one has to seek air and try to breathe,” Goodwin observed. “They are in a state in which they would probably choke if they didn’t find air. In other words, they are seeking a place to breathe, rising, trying to move out.”

The ambitious scale and transparency Goodwin achieved in these works required inventive techniques that she explored by trial and error. Initially, she soaked paper in turpentine to transform it into an aqueous field closer to the effect of water she sought, but the process exposed her to noxious fumes. After extensive research, she identified synthetic translucent materials that produced a similar effect. The swimmer drawings were composed over several lengths of adjoined sheets to accommodate the scale Goodwin sought. As she continued to concentrate on her drawings over the next decade, spontaneous adjustments were typical of Goodwin’s method of advancing and retreating, allowing the marks she made to determine her next moves.

Goodwin’s re-engagement with the figure in these major works coincided with a shift taking place in the wider art world. American painters Julian Schnabel (b.1951), Eric Fischl (b.1948), and David Salle (b.1952), Italian Francesco Clemente (b.1952), and German Jörg Immendorf (1945–2007) were but a few in a male-dominated trend toward figuration in the early 1980s that encompassed a wide variety of subjects and approaches often grouped under the term Neo-Expressionism. Goodwin’s abiding use of the body as an expressive vehicle resonated in this artistic climate, but her work differed considerably, possessing neither the characteristic brashness nor the narrative impulses that her contemporaries used in their figurative imagery.

Larger than any drawings she had done before, the swimmer works were enthusiastically acclaimed. When they were shown in late 1983 in New York at the 49th Parallel gallery, critic Donald Kuspit wrote in Art in America, “Goodwin makes both subjectivity of image and objectivity of material excruciating, freshly difficult. She creates an eloquent ambiguity of relationship between material means and artistic vision.”  The swimmer drawings led the way to further experimentation with materials as drawing became Goodwin’s primary medium in the decades that followed.