Santa Fe, NM – In his first solo exhibition at LewAllen Galleries, realist painter Brent Godfrey has created a riveting show entitled Nature|Nurture, consisting of more than 25 virtuosic paintings in oil or acrylic capping a brilliant career that spans over 25 years. Using an uncanny ability to infuse gorgeous imagery with mystery and allusive power, Godfrey creates paintings of family and nature whose apparent serenity often disguises a razor sharp capacity to incite memory and provoke re-examination of assumptions.
A technical painter of the first order, Godfrey’s imagery can, at first glance, seem nostalgic or bucolic, but close contemplation reveals complex social and cultural issues or psychological journeys. His integration of abstraction with representational and sometimes incongruent juxtaposition translates objects, figures, and landscapes into personal and cultural patterns of self-exposure, both for the artist and his observer. His paintings lure and entertain with visual metaphor, nostalgia or humor, while provoking a sense of wonder and uncertainty that asks, “Please look and please think.”
The exhibition title, Nature|Nurture, is broadly suggestive of two currents explored in this body of work. Ideas and accepted notions surrounding childhood are engaged in works whose imagery references mid-century family photography of parents and children while connecting to universal memories through Godfrey’s autobiographical lens. In the service of personal authenticity, these engaging “snapshots” trigger often forgotten or repressed recollection as a foundation to re-examine assumptions about childhood and growth into adulthood. Blink and an image of a nice mother and child suddenly transforms into a personal memory of intense feeling that the painting unearths from some deep recess of memory.
Other of the paintings build an almost mythic specter of the natural world with animal forms suggesting the evolving relationship and blurred boundaries between man and his environment. In these, the artist’s passion for nature is palpable, as is his yearning to arrest the reckless trajectory of man’s too frequent disregard of his place within it and responsibility for its future. In “The Walk,” the scumbled form of a naked man running with a huge bear seizes the intellect and becomes a metaphor of the ability of wilderness to inspire grace.
Godfrey has a remarkable capacity for clever use of image to activate memory. He understands that without memory, experience can only be sensation. Only with memory can there be meaning. But memory can be too tidy, and Godfrey’s work implies that if left unexamined – what he sometimes calls “untickled” – memory can become a work of fiction displacing fact with details and impressions fashioned by the psyche more to satisfy emotional need than to promote authentic personal growth.
In many of these paintings, we see that, left alone and faded by the passage of time, childhood memories – like old photos have a way of washing out all but a few of the details. Many of these images resemble old soft-focus snapshots that he then obscures with various techniques. His blur conceals, but also reveals. Godfrey both blurs and adds detail, “showing less and inferring more… the figures and setting become more thought-like and less illustrative,” he says. In this play between image and abstraction, Godfrey explores the sensed world, prodding memory and feeling to tease out the sublime with beautiful paintings that resonate intimately with shared experiences and shift perception with startling coherence.
Raised in Utah, Godfrey graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from Weber State University before completing a Master of Education from Brigham Young University, and continuing his painting studies in Italy. A professional painter for over 25 years, Godfrey has been featured internationally in museum and gallery exhibitions and significant solo shows, including representing the United States at the 2007 Florence Biennial.
