Heather Goodwind
About Heather:
Portland, Oregon
Heather Goodwind was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1973, and grew up between Berkeley, California and Key West, Florida. Her drawings represent a constant outpouring of singular impressions: clearly isolated images that capture flashes of emotion, changes in perception or moments of recognition. She gives fleeting thoughts as much consideration as monumental ideas: nothing is more important than anything else and every small has its place.
Heather spends her days drawing, sculpting, and homeschooling her daughter. She is a recovering vegetarian, an avid yerba Buena mate drinker and an intermittent insomniac.
Heather joined Grand Image in 2014.
Q+A
Grand Image: How did you get your start in art?
HG: I come from a family of artists, craftspeople, and antique dealers, so making things (and appreciating well-made things) was a fundamental part of my childhood experience.
Grand Image: How did you develop your style?
HG: I think the first major step I took towards developing my own style was through the influence of poetry. I particularly admired Izumi Shikibu, a 16th century Japanese poet, as well as the American poets Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and Hilda Doolittle. I loved the straightforward simplicity, clarity, and wit with which they crafted their word-images, and I began to think about how I could apply those principles to crafting my own images.
Grand Image: Where are you from and how is that reflected in your work?
HG: I'm an American artist, and I think if someone were to look through all the works in my huge portfolio (which are on my website, in chronological order and without omissions) they would definitely see the crazy jumble of everything that makes this place I call home so wonderfully complicated, messy, and beautiful.
Grand Image: How has your relationship with art changed the way you view the world?
HG: I see symbolism, archetypes, and metaphors in everything - from daily human interactions to the movement of celestial bodies.
Grand Image: What was the inspiration behind your new pieces? Can you tell us a little bit about your shift in subject matter to include more natural and celestial items?
HG: After years of living in huge, sprawling cities like New York, Buenos Aries, and Beijing, I finally settled down in Portland, Oregon, which is surrounded by some of the most amazing natural areas that exist anywhere in the world. So I've been spending a lot of time hiking, wave watching, stargazing, and reconnecting with nature, and it's definitely coming out in my work.
Grand Image: How many years have you been an artist? Can you tell us about a key moment in your
journey that helped define your style or your identity?
HG: I graduated from university in 1996, so that was the official moment when I stopped being a student and started being an artist. Seven years after that I had a major artistic crisis, and I quit making art with the intention of giving it up forever. When I started again about a year later, I had more clarity about what I was doing and why than I had ever had before. It's kind of ironic, but deciding to quit being an artist was the thing that helped me really own it as my identity.
Grand Image: What is your current source of inspiration?
HG: I like to watch opera while I work. I know most of the stories so well that I only look up occasionally to check the subtitles or see a favorite scene, so the rest of the time I'm just listening to the music. One of the things I love about opera is how time stops while one of the characters sings about how they feel. I think of it as "emotional realism" because we all know that two intense seconds can feel like two full minutes, and in opera they just expand it out the way it really feels.
Grand Image: What artists inspire you?
HG: There are way too many artists that inspire me to name here, but the ones I've been looking at lately are Charles Burchfield, Ithell Colquhoun, Edvard Munch, William Blake, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kerry James Marshall, and Paula Modersohn-Becker. All of them are visual storytellers that magnify emotional and psychological states, and they all have a strong sense of visual rhythm in their images - your eye can't help but move around and through their works.
I've also been rereading Whitman's Leaves of Grass, especially "Song of Myself", which inspires me to no end and always reminds me to embrace the chaos of life and art making.
Grand Image: If you could have your artwork hung anywhere in the world, where would you like that to be and why?
HG: I like the idea of my artwork hanging in people's houses, or living in picture books on their bookshelves. The home is a very intimate setting where people can relax and be themselves, where they can read their own narratives into the images without worrying about who's watching or what anybody else thinks.
Grand Image: What advice would you give someone starting out as an artist?
HG: Document everything, because you never know what those images will mean to you later or who else might be interested in them. This is less difficult now in the age of cell phone cameras and cloud storage, but it's still easy to forget (or to be dismissive about) the importance of little things, so I think it's worth doing intentionally and systematically.