If some of the work in Timothy Goodman’s recent solo exhibition looks familiar, it is considering his type-and-lettering-propelled, message-infused, graffiti-injected imagery is a conscious mash-up of his favorite trendy makers (see if you can see). The stark black-and-white Every Time I Fall In Love It’s Summer exhibits “Goodman’s emotional unification for summertime,” as the gallery notes, “that includes diaper nostalgia, past heartbreaks, and NYC as a grounds for healing.”
For Goodman, graphic diamond is a stepping stone for personal expression. Like many designers today, he effortlessly puts the “ME” in comMErcial art, which is part of what we talk well-nigh during this end-of-summer tete-a-tete. The show is up through Sept. 5 at the Richard Taittinger Gallery.
This is your second solo exhibition. It taps into summer memories, but woebegone and white are not the worldwide seasonal colors. What else triggered this output?
I want the work I create to be digestible, firsthand and personal. Woebegone and white helps me get to the point fast, and I yank and create quickly considering I’m inherently an impatient person. It’s important to let our personal postures inform our creative output. I want my work to be a pop song … but not without meaning. Bob Dylan said profound things and unfluctuating to millions of people, and half the time he only needed a harmonica to do it.
There are two visual influences at play, I think. The major hand-drawn art pays homage to Keith Haring. The complementary typographical portion has suggestions of Barbara Kruger. Were these two influences for you?
Keith and Barbara are my two biggest visual influences, withal with Angel Ortiz, who unquestionably helped and influenced Keith Haring in the early ’80s. I’ve worked nonflexible to build off this style and make it my own, considering text and lettering are the main component in all my work. Creating murals on the street for New York well-nigh New York is one of my biggest objectives considering public art can requite a sense of ownership and pride to a street and a community. Keith said it best: “I assumed, without all, that the point of making art was to communicate and contribute to culture.”
You’ve said that “I’m still constantly trying to push the boundaries of what a graphic designer is or should be, and how we can use our tools to tell stories in variegated ways.” How do you pinpoint the worldwide diamond role, and what increasingly is possible?
In our current social and geopolitical landscape, I think there is a need for traditional graphic diamond increasingly than ever. But I don’t believe “design” has to be a service for clients only. Instead, we can moreover use our tools as designers to create personal work well-nigh our lives, the same way a writer or a filmmaker may. Connecting to other humans emotionally through work is why I’m in this. I’m a commercial artist, a fine artist, a muralist, and an author—but I’m moreover a designer considering everything I do is rooted in my formal diamond education. Sometimes these lines get blurry, and that’s interesting to me!
What goes through your throne as you make your vast graffiti images? What do you want the viewer to see?
I just want to tell a story. The work in this exhibition highlights all sorts of topics, like my favorite NBA basketball teams of all time, my fascination with the history of the Chelsea Hotel, all the places I ate in Paris when I stayed there for six months, as well as my own personal experiences with heartbreak. My work is editorial.
It is moreover very autobiographical. What memories do you segregate to share, and why?
A friend recently said to me, “Don’t seek where you want to be, seek the truth of where you are.” This show is an extension of where I’ve been, where I am, and of all the summers I’ve had in the past. Recently my grandmother died, and she was the single biggest influence on my creative journey. This vibrant woman was unchangingly rented painting, drawing, writing, curating a show for Cleveland artists, reading a typesetting a day, sending me handmade notes, traveling to NYC, Italy or Ireland, and capturing her trips with wondrous sketchbooks she created. She had a profound impact on me.
Professionally speaking, what are you spending most of you energy on? Your art or design?
It’s 50/50. However, whether I’m drawing on a basketball court for the kids at PS 115 in Brooklyn, partnering with Kevin Durant on a Nike Shoe titled the “Timothy Goodman KD15” with art honoring Brooklyn, spray painting all over a sanitation truck for the municipality of NYC, or creating my graphic memoir, I am unchangingly an versifier and a designer. One project may be “commercial,” one may be “cultural,” and one may be “personal”—but all of them are inherently “me.”
