There is a stillness to Lindsey Goodwin’s paintings, a feeling of calm in the laid back luxury of well ordered dining rooms, her favourite subject matter. I was introduced to this young award-winning artist’s work by Tom Byrne, an Irish artist and curator who works for Galerie DDG on the Île St. Louis, where her work can be found. She is a driven painter from California, who gave up a full university scholarship to devote herself to studying classical painting. Her treatment is as refined and as rich the subjects that she paints, and these Internet images barely do justice to her skilful handling of light and texture.
The ritualised spaces that she paints are practically always devoid of people but are populated by formally set tables. The chairs, or the curtains or any other item could disappear from these scenes and it would change their feel, the way that they are. But remove the highly structured tables and it would change the essence of what they are, a magical pause, of anticipation and memory of the ritual of dining. A timelessness that emerges from the many hours that she spends absorbed before her subject.
