A Day with my Father, a Day with my Son (2018)
41 pencil drawings (sizes variable) 203x135mm x3; 135x255mm x10; 135x203mm x11; 255x135mm x4; 99x176mm x5; 99x75mm x8

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Extract from Publication 'Close: Drawn Portraits' written by Kate MacFarlane, published by Drawing Room, London
 
Dryden Goodwin made this new suite of drawings for 'Close: Drawn Portraits' (Exhibition at the Drawing Room, London - November 2018 - February 2019) to give form to the distinct intimacy between a grandfather, father and son. He spent a day in the company of his father, and a day in that of his teenage son, making studies of their head, face and hands as they went about their daily activities. Goodwin's subjects chatted as he drew them, withdrew into private activities such as reading, homework and playing a keyboard, or engaged in more physical pursuits such as watering the garden or playing ball. All of the studies are modest in scale, but are made variously on horizontal, vertical and square sheets of paper, each grabbed from a pile some-what intuitively. Across the forty-one studies Goodwin uses the same grade of pencil. His pencil darts around, accentuating the profile of the nose, or the fleshy lobe of the ear or the fall of the upper lip; like Cezanne before him, Goodwin endeavours to keep alive the sensation of observation.
 
"Here the lines are clipped - it's to do with duration - when you're looking at someone - looking up and downsampling - then you suddenly realise you're not really looking - and then you discover a relationship that you can put down quickly - sometimes I look longer - there's not one way I do it - it's always slipping - there's a slight hiatus - because I'm not quite sure..."
 
Goodwin likes the idea that a drawing has a future:
 
'...but you stop the drawing before you realise all its possibilities - what you leave out is as important as what you put in...'
 
As he draws he becomes aware of characteristics shared by these intimate family members, but also discovers new traits. He shares a fixated form of looking with Freud and other artists in the exhibition - the way that in focussing on the mouth or the eye, for example, it becomes dislocated from the person and is made strange.
 
The drawings are displayed in a vitrine, keeping true to the orientation of their production, and are arranged to suggest the rhythm of the day and its duration -
 
'physical remnants of a moment that you can hold'.
 
Varying light conditions, different levels of intimacy and fluctuating energy levels can be detected through close looking at this suite of drawings which are a temporal graphic record of Goodwin's day with his father and day with his son.
 
'A Day with my Father, a Day with my Son', was first shown as part of the group exhibition 'Close: Drawn Portraits' at the Drawing Room, London. Including drawings by Mounira Al Solh, Frank Auerbach, Paul Cezanne, Virginia Chihota, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Horst Janssen, Claudette Johnson, Michael Landy, Maria Lassnig, Joyce Pensato, Deanna Petherbridge, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Paula Rego, Nicola Tyson, Jessica Voorsanger and Clifton Wright.
 
'A Day with my Father, a Day with my Son' described by Martin Gayford in the Spectator as "...a meditation on intimacy..."
 

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