Two Male Figures, 1997

Collection of the artist Private Collection, Montreal

Rober Racine, “Surely She’s Seen Me Looking at Them...”, in The Art of Betty Goodwin, Matthew Teitelbaum and Jessica Bradley (eds.), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1998, pages 76-77 Jessica Bradley, Betty Goodwin: Signs of Life, Art Gallery of Windsor, 1995, page 22

“Two Male Figures” reveals the human form in Goodwin’s signature highly expressive manner. Her trademark “floating figures” invoke universal themes of existence, life, death and memory, concerns which resonate with the viewer. Discussing similar works in 1988, Rober Racine writes that: “[T]he subjects take each other in their arms, let themselves go. They shout each other’s heads off, bodies off. They float in an embrace, emerge, regenerate and burst, torn to pieces... They possess a force which wakens us to form, to the beauty of natural movement, the beauty of taking the other’s body and biting an ear off if it doesn’t hear our cry of love... They demonstrate that we must touch one another, meld into each other.” Despite the strong sense of loss and despair often encountered in her drawings, they likewise seem to “embody a resilience, a sense of possibility and renewal within the work itself.” A quote from Leonardo da Vinci, inscribed upon the inside of the framing glass, reads: “But in what terms am I able to describe the abominable and awful evils against which know human resource avails?”