Dorothy Eileen Goode
October 4, 1969-November 23, 2020
Beloved Portland-based artist Dorothy Goode passed away on November 23, 2020, in her apartment in southeast Portland. She died in her sleep, peacefully but unexpectedly, of a pulmonary embolism. An autopsy revealed a heart condition and other underlying conditions that had not been previously known. During a 30-year career centered in the Pacific Northwest, Goode was known for her exuberant compositions in the vein of lyrical abstraction. Deploying egg-tempera paints—a medium associated with Byzantine and early Renaissance art—in a striking integration of ancient and modern, she layered and excavated translucent gestures in an array of bold and subtle colors. She viewed her compositions as “moveable math problems” to be solved through a blend of painstaking deliberation and inspired improvisation. Often she would sit in yoga poses contemplating a panel for hours before rising to make a single, definitive mark.
Born in Santa Rosa, California, to James Bruce Goode and Patricia Ann Tuft Goode, she grew up south of Point Arena with older siblings Kevin and Marji. The family lived on a back-to-the-land compound, where they raised goats, chickens, rabbits, geese, and turkeys. It was here on the fog-shrouded precipice of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by redwoods and pampas grass, that she learned the virtues of self-sustenance, hard work, and farm-to-table cooking. Throughout her life she delighted in preparing hearty stews, pastas, and curries for family and friends; baking pies with Marji was a perennial holiday tradition. The family moved to Prescott, Arizona, in 1984.
A precocious student, Goode (known to her friends as "Dori" or "Dory") graduated high school and began college at age 16 at Northern Arizona University, studying illustration, printmaking, and painting. After moving to Portland in the 1990s, she was discovered by Butters Gallery, which exhibited her work for the better part of two decades. She also had solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Santa Fe, Atlanta, and Nagasaki, Japan. Her most recent show, “Transfixed,” was held at Augen Gallery in December 2019. Of that exhibition, arts writer Friderike Heuer observed: “What drew me in was the sense of something moving, of speed--giddy and compulsively driven... playful beauty, geometric lightness in 3D.” As a parallel practice to her paintings, her graphite and ink drawings exuded wry humor and outrageous, sometimes risqué, imagery. The do-it-yourself ethos of her childhood lingered in her art practice. She cooked her own gesso; sanded, braced, and framed her own panels; and painstakingly cross-hatched her intricate early drawings, sometimes investing hundreds of hours in a single work. Her only slightly tongue-in-cheek motto, scrawled onto her studio wall, was: “Maximize difficulty for fun and profit.” The historical artists she most admired were John Singer Sargent, Egon Schiele, and Willem de Kooning.
For many years her day job was shelving books at the Multnomah County Library, where she made many lasting friends. She was a prolific reader whose library numbered in the thousands. Her favorite authors were Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Bowles, Anaïs Nin, Jean Genet, Haruki Murakami, Alan Hollinghurst, and Paul Theroux. Also an inveterate journaler, in later years she chronicled her journeys across Alaska, New Zealand, Australia, Nepal, Japan, and Mongolia. A lover of the open road, motion, and expansive vistas, she was rarely happier than when behind the wheel of her 1979 Ford Econoline van, which she drove intrepidly around the country, culminating in an epic 2014 road trip from Portland to Alaska and back. In 2019, for her 50th birthday, she fulfilled a dream to ride the Trans-Siberian Railway from the Russian Far East all the way to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
A complex personality and fiercely opinionated feminist, she also had a warmer, gentler side. She was a lover of animals, especially goats and rodents, and of “Rocky” movies, of which she was a devotee. “Zoolander” was another favorite, as was "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," the dialogue of which she could practically recite from memory. Music was a passion, for she grew up listening to her father playing piano and spinning records on the family stereo. Her favorite piece of classical music was The Well-tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach, followed closely by Bach’s suites for solo cello. In popular music she was a fan of Joni Mitchell and Prince, and was a late but enthusiastic convert to karaoke, belting out tunes by Conway Twitty, George Michael, Gordon Lightfoot, and Hank Williams, Jr.. She knew how to man a tiller on a sailboat, confidently steering her friend Jon Erikson’s boat on many a pleasant evening with friends on the Columbia River. She was also a much-loved member of her yoga community (she practiced a style called Shadow Yoga) and her "Land" community, a group of longtime friends who gather every summer in the mountains east of Ashland, Oregon.
Her untimely death has been greeted with deep sadness by the art community as well as her family and friends around the world. Predeceased by her mother, Patricia Goode, she is survived by her father James Goode, brother Kevin Goode, sister Marji Goode-Sjogren, nephew D.J. Brown, nieces Samantha Sjogren and Katie Sulista, and life partner Richard Speer. Augen Gallery in Portland will host a celebration of life and an exhibition of her final series, Jubilant, in August 2022. For information about Dorothy Goode’s artwork, please visit https://www.augengallery.com/artists/artists/goode/ and www.dorothygoode.com.
