Alison Goodwin

In the nearly two decades Alison Goodwin has been exhibiting her paintings and prints throughout New England, her work has been widely appreciated for her dexterous immersion in a range of styles, each coupling a mature deliberation of composition with an unhesitating verve for thoroughgoing investigation.

Characterized by unruly, saturated, turbulent color, the rejection of rolling natural vistas in favor of craggy, skewed perspectives, Goodwin’s work forms a direct link to the emotion and expression of the revolutionary artists of Paris a century ago—Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the Fauvists, but also Klimt, Matisse, and Giotto.

Many of the paintings the artist has chosen to exhibit at BigTown Gallery—in her first one-woman show in Vermont, her home of fourteen years—focus on the rich variety of landscape she finds here—the vibrant patterns of color washed in the changes of season, the intricate perspectives of topography cast by the changes in light and shade.

Goodwin’s Vermont paintings conjure from the dialogue of earth, stone, sky, field, and forest an enduring narrative of place, and from the interplay of point of view and perspective extract a rough-hewn contemplation, complexity intact, of time, the instant and its duration—as in Gustav Klimt crossed with Robert Frost..