NO.10 JOSEPH GOODY

Pinned up to the wall in the artist Joseph Goody’s south London studio is a series of postcards. They include a 15 th century battle scene by Paolo Uccello, a still life by wartime painter Paul Nash and a haunting portrait of a nude by Edvard Munch. Not one abstract?, I ask the largely non-figurative painter. He laughs and says, “there’s always something about the hyper-organised alignment of things in painting that I find interesting. When you have structure, you have expectation. It speaks for itself.”

Structure has been the thread that runs through all of his works, whether large scale painting or small, soft watercolours. Goody cut his teeth studying fine art at the highly conceptual Goldsmiths before doing a course at the Royal Drawing School, which he describes as a complete U-turn. The mix of the avant-garde and the traditional remains apparent in his works today and are all united in his interest in form.

Are his pieces totally abstract? “They are in spirit but there is often something figurative that happens, although only ever very minimal. I’ve been reading a lot of Kafka so castles and turrets and parapets just happened in one picture,” he says. Rilke is another influence. “He writes about something specific like the throwing of a ball or the swinging of a rope but it opens up into something entirely different," Joseph says, making clear this influence on his own work. “Abstraction is supposedly about ambiguity – that things can mean anything – but I like the challenge of whittling meaning down into specificity, however arbitrary or simple it may be.”

Joseph comes into the studio three or so days a week, starts early with a coffee and reading before painting. Works will be tended to over the course of months, with paintings put away after a time, a watercolour tended to and vice versa, before returning to other works sometimes months later. “I like to let myself forget about things. It helps keep things moving.”

I notice a guitar in the corner. Does that help the process too? “It’s positive procrastination I guess,” he says, explaining how he often writes songs in the studio too. “I find coming up with a melody and a counter-melody so interesting; that you can play with feelings of expectation. That’s the same as painting to me,” he concludes.