GAS Featured Artist: Hananya Goodman, presented by Sylvia Van Nooten

Hananya Goodman’s work explodes off the page. His brush strokes create a complex vision of depth and color.  Each painting is like a poetic insight into the artist, the asemic letters creating emotion in the viewer.  He is a prolific artist, his almost daily sessions produce many pieces, each a standalone representation of the interpretation of beauty. ~ Sylvia Van Nooten  

 Hananya Goodman in his own words:

Most of my life I have been immersed in the world of books. My upbringing, education, career and passion have been driven and tied up with reading and writing. A few years ago the writing suddenly turned to scribbling with fingers dancing across the page with strokes, scripts, marks and drawings. At that time, I was trying to find some connection between textile and text. In contrast with the language in books, these asemic marks had minimal to zero cognitive intent or meaning.  Aesthetically though I recognized emergent novel values and pleasures.  When I started seriously doing this art for the first time a few years ago, I saw this as an integral continuation or elaboration of a larger project called Talmud Hananya. Talmud in Hebrew means "learning." Talmud Hananya is my personal life-long project to learn about life and the world.  It is a massive collection of handwritten scribbles, jottings, notes, words, phrases, and paragraphs from which emerges gestures and drawings of organic feeling and sensing.

The images created have now taken on a life of their own. Today doing art gives me a sense of control or creative accomplishment in my life, it adds meaning and value to my life, and it gives pleasure to me and others through play and display.

I hope to pursue in the future explorations of the relationships between asemic and semic, a character set based on asemic images, and something Talmudic or kabbalistic.

Each of my images is created in the moment, without any initial image, language or intent.  They are very visceral process oriented executions in the sense of automaticity and situational immediacy rather than imagined, constrained and verified in order to conform with some preconceived plan. The work arises from a continuous engagement with the medium, until some significant quality appears to assert itself and emerges from the paper. The very moment of recognition of a quality or character is the point I stop and complete a piece. I have a voice inside telling me: "stop this piece" and "stop this session."

I consider each image as a character, both in a personal identity sense, and in an ideographic/logography sense. As these characters are born and fill my studio and begin to interact in meaningful new ways, I hope one day to join them into a cohesive language family. They live with me and one another in a sense, so I have trouble parting with the originals.

Showing art has connected me with a community of like-hearted and like-minded artists and followers around the world. I am grateful for their friendship, and my images are glad to participate in this larger world.

My only real self-defined community are those doing asemic art and abstract art. There are many wonderful artist friends I would love to tell you about but I will only mention Floriana Rigo as the most important influence on me as an artist. I continue to find asemic art, and groups devoted to asemic art, to be a nourishing source of ideas, inspiration and receptive audience. I am most active there and have benefited enormously and significantly from its members who are loosely bound by the ever adaptive  definition of asemic writing and abstract art.

Most of my public works can be viewed on Facebook. 

I also have a nascent website with higher quality images. 

I have exhibited at BROLO Centro d’Arte e Cultura, Mogliano, Veneto, Italy and at the MAINSITE Contemporary Art gallery, Norman, Oklahoma.

Typical artistic materials are 50 x 70 cm, 250 gram paper, gouache, India ink and soft chalk. Tools: lulav (middle shaft of the palm tree), cleaning brushes, scrapers, tubes, rolling pins, pens/pencils, bamboo spoons, and other odd objects. I have over 8,000 pieces and do an average of 20 pieces at a time. Each piece is created during a daily session lasting about two hours. I have a particular atmosphere or ritual I create during a session which  is very important to me. All pieces are done in a fugue-like state where I interact with the media and tools. Once completed in the session, the pieces do not receive any further additions. I usually show all my work on Facebook the day after the session.

I am the Director of Libraries for an engineering college. I have been an academic librarian for over 20 years but before that I worked in education for 20 years. Originally from Racine, Wisconsin, I graduated from the University of Wisconsin where I studied biology. I did graduate studies at Brandeis and Simmons. I currently live near the Sea in Ashdod, Israel. 

Publications I am most proud of include a book,  Between Jerusalem and Benares: Studies in Comparative Judaism and Hinduism,

 Kabbalah: A Newsletter of Current Research in Jewish Mysticism, 

 "Geomancy Texts of Rabbi Shalom Shabbazi." 

 "The Legend of the Dull-Witted Child Who Grew Up to Be a Genius" (on Einstein) with Barbara Wolff