Nucleus (Primary Title)
Judith Godwin, American, 1930 - 2021 (Artist)
I’m not thinking; I’m doing it. I just have something maybe in the back of my mind, and usually they are, sort of, not explosive things, but movements. . . . I really am in love with dance. –Judith Godwin
For more than sixty years, Virginia-born artist Judith Godwin explored abstract painting, recording motion and gesture with brushstrokes on canvas. Her dynamic compositions, layered with drips and splatters of paint, epitomized the “action painting” of the 1950s. One of her earliest experiments in abstraction, Nucleus was made in the same year Godwin discovered her passion for dance. Impressed by photographs of Martha Graham’s dynamic dance movements and fluid costumes, Judith Godwin arranged for Graham to perform at Mary Baldwin College, in Staunton, Virginia, in 1950, where Godwin was a student. Graham invited Godwin to visit her in New York, and after Godwin moved there in the early 1950s, she attended as many of the dancer’s performances as possible. Although Godwin declined Graham’s suggestion that she become a dancer herself, the close relationship between the motion of modern dance and the rhythmic composition of Godwin’s paintings provide a central motif for Godwin’s body of work as a whole.
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