GOODING, Mel 1941-

PERSONAL: Born June 3, 1941; son of Frederick and Kathleen (Cox) Gooding; married Esther Rhiannon Coslette, 1967; children: Francis, Thomas Education: University of Sussex, B.A., M.A. Hobbies and other interests: Bird watching, walking.

ADDRESSES: Home—62 Castelnau, Barnes, London SW13 9EX, England. Offıce—Edinburgh College of Art, 79 Grassmarket, Edinburgh EH1 2HU, Scotland. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Sidney Webb College of Education, London, England, lecturer in English, 1972-80; London Polytechnic, London, lecturer in English, 1980-94; Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, senior resident fellow, beginning 1998. Curator of museum exhibits.

MEMBER: International Association of Art Critics.

WRITINGS:

Bruce McLean, Phaidon Universe (New York, NY), 1990.

(Author of text) William Alsop: Buildings and Projects, Princeton Architectural Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) Alastair Brotchie, compiler, Surrealist Games, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 1993, published as A Book of Surrealist Games: Including the Little Surrealist Dictionary, 1995.

(Editor, with Julian Rothenstein) Alphabets and OtherSigns, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 1993.

(Editor) The Paradox Box: Optical Illusions, PuzzlingPictures, Verbal Diversions, selected and designed by Julian Rothenstein, foreword by Jonathan Miller, Shambhala (Boston, MA) 1994.

Patrick Heron, Phaidon Press (London, England), 1994.

(Author of text) Mary Fedden, Ashgate Publishing Co. (Brookfield, VT), 1995.

(Editor) Painter as Critic, Patrick Heron: SelectedWritings, Tate Gallery (London, England), 1998.

(Author of text) Artists, photographs by Gautier Deblonde, Tate Gallery (London, England), 1999.

(Editor with Julian Rothenstein) The Playful Eye, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2000.

(With James Hulme and Ken Powell) Alsop: Not Architecture, Aedes (Berlin, Germany), 2001.

Gillian Ayres (biography), Lund Humphries (Burlington, VT), 2001.

Abstract Art ("Movements in Modern Art" series), Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(With William Furlong) Artists, Land, Nature, Harry N. Abrams (New York, NY), 2002, published as Song of the Earth, Thames & Hudson (London, England), 2002.

Ceri Richards, Cameron & Hollis (Moffat, Wales), 2002.

(Editor with Julian Rothenstein) ABZ: More Alphabets and Other Signs, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

(With David Elliott) Sylvia Edwards, Sylvia Edwards, Pallas Athene (England), 2003.

The Psychobox, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 2004.

Wihlelmina Barnes-Graham, Harry N. Abrams (New York, NY), 2005.

Also author of exhibition catalogues for artists, including Bruce McLean, Michael Upton, F. E. McWilliam, and Ceri Richards. Contributor to books, including Public—Art—Space: A Decade of Public Art Commissions Agency, 1987-1997, Merrell Holberton (London, England), 1998, and to periodicals, including Arts Review, Artscribe, Flash Art, and Art Monthly.

SIDELIGHTS: Mel Gooding is a London-based art critic and curator who has written and edited a number of volumes, including exhibition catalogs that feature the work of artists such as Ceri Richards, Michael Upton, Bruce McLean, Mary Fedden, Gillian Ayres, sculptor F. E. McWilliam, and architect William Alsop, as well as books of general art criticism and other works.

Gooding pays tribute to Patrick Heron, an artist who was also a critic, in Patrick Heron. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that "in this stunningly illustrated monograph, art critic Gooding sensitively explores a dynamic body of work unfamiliar to most American art lovers." Merlin Ingli James reviewed the book in the Times Literary Supplement, writing that Gooding "aims to show why Heron is 'a visual inventor of the first rank, an originator of images and a colourist of genius.' Gooding wants to demonstrate too, that the artist's brushes with art criticism in the 1940s and 1950s assisted and grew out of, rather than conflicted with, his painting practice." The book is a combination of art history, biography, and criticism.

Painter as Critic, Patrick Heron: Selected Writings focuses on Heron's activities as an art critic and features a bright orange and yellow cover designed by Heron himself. Heron wrote for art journals and periodicals both in England and the United States and was instrumental in defining British abstract art, over three decades beginning in the 1940s. Artforum International contributor Brian O'Doherty wrote that "the equipment with which Heron serviced his insights at the time is out of fashion now—a canny formalism, an empirical edge, lucid prose, a fellow tradesman's knowledge of techniques, a passion for painting attended by a kind of quasi-moralistic worrying. His equipment was suited to his task: to mediate between the best work he saw and local art, which he judged by the highest (transnational) standards. His recognition of what was important in pre-and postwar French art is almost faultless." Times Literary Supplement critic Kathleen Brunner noted that the chronologically ordered essays "chart the coming of age of post-war British art, and its pivotal role, as Heron sees it, in the synthesis of early European modernism and American Abstract Expressionism."

Heron's crossover to pure abstractionism came after his viewing of the large-scale, abstract works of American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Dutch-born Willem de Kooning in a January, 1956 exhibition staged at the Tate Gallery in London. These works inspired the artist's more architectural, large-format "stripe" paintings. During the 1960s, Heron reserved more of his admiration for British artists, feeling, in fact, that it was to them that Americans owed a debt of gratitude. In his most recent writings, Heron has turned his attention to such masters as Picasso and Matisse.

Mary Fedden offers sixty color and several black-and-white illustrations of the still-life artist, "and allows us to see more clearly the aesthetic sophistication which lies behind her apparent simplicity," according to Frances Spalding in the Times Literary Supplement. Spalding added that Gooding "notes Fedden's schematic flattening of objects, her scattering of them across the picture space without regard for conventional perspective, and, in general, the cunning of her pictorial choreography." Spalding felt that the slim volume's "modesty is entirely in keeping with its subject. Mary Fedden is the least pretentious of artists. Her still lifes deal with the familiar in clearly stated decorative terms."

Gooding has also produced volumes on artists Gillian Ayres and Sylvia Edwards. Ayres began her career as a contemporary abstract artist in the 1950s. Her work embraces both British and American style, and she was the only woman artist represented in the Situation exhibits of early 1960s London. For her large paintings, she used both oil and household paints and a drip-and-pour technique. By the 1970s Ayres was painting in oils, creating some of the most sensuous images in British art. Gooding has included more than 130 of her works in this volume. Edwards, an American-born artist, creates large-scale works in watercolors and acrylics. She is a generous benefactor of such organizations as Greenpeace and UNICEF in donating them rights to some of her paintings, which most often feature landscapes, animals, flowers, tapestries, and figures in fantasy-like works that resemble folk art as well as the styles of Matisse and Klée. Goodings' book, the first volume to be published on Edwards, includes 155 color plates, including a signed lithograph and three other originals. Library Journal reviewer Mary Hamel Bruce called the volume "very beautiful."

Gooding has produced a number of whimsical volumes that deal with games, tricks, and optical illusion. With Alastair Brotchie, he wrote Surrealist Games, which includes games, as well as techniques for creating stories, poems, and collages. The surrealists were very inventive with parlor games, and several that are included here are definitely not intended to be played by children. Gooding is also editor, with Julian Rothenstein, of The Playful Eye. The visuals that fool the eye, drawn from European and Asian art, have delighted viewers for centuries. Gooding and Rothenstein also collaborated on ABZ: More Alphabets and Other Signs, which features a variety of types, including some from such obscure sources as a 1950s Mexican book jacket and Dutch eye test charts. Human and other figures are incorporated into many of the letters, which Print reviewer Grant Widmer called "both elegant and idiosyncratic. . . . If only the modern alphabet could love anyone the way Mel Gooding loves it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Artforum International, December, 1998, Brian O'Doherty, review of Painter as Critic, Patrick Heron: Selected Writings, p. 19.

Library Journal, November 1, 2002, Paula Frosch, review of Artists, Land, Nature, p. 84; October 1, 2003, Mary Hamel Bruce, review of Sylvia Edwards, p. 70.

New Statesman & Society, November 29, 1991, Ian Breakwell, review of Surrealist Games, p. 31.

Print, September-October, 2003, Grant Widmer, review of ABZ: More Alphabets and Other Signs, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, September 12, 1994, review of Patrick Heron, p. 75.

Times Literary Supplement, August 4, 1995, Frances Spalding, review of Mary Fedden, p. 17; September 1, 1995, Merlin Ingli James, review of Patrick Heron, pp. 16-17; December 25, 1998, Kathleen Brunner, review of Painter as Critic, Patrick Heron, p. 18.*