Kathy Goodell's In the Darkness I See at Private Public Gallery

Kathy Goodell. In the Darkness I See. Installation view. Photo courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Autumn Lin

BY CLARE GEMIMA, November 3, 2025

In the Darkness I See Kathy Goodell October 18 - November 16, 2025 Private Public Gallery 530 Columbia St, Hudson, NY

Kathy Goodell doesn’t want anyone deciphering how she paints. In truth, when she looks at the canvases that currently fill Private Public in Hudson, she can’t, for the life of her, recall how she made them. “Something else takes over,” she told me with a giggle, as she buoyantly glided across the gallery. Rightfully proud of these recent works, Goodell’s abstractions are unpretentious yet resolute, and hold their ground through her intention to create singular entities rather than a chorus of characters. Blending atmospheric hues, sporadic calligraphies, and accidental pareidoliac forms, In the Darkness I See illuminates personal anecdotes, stories, and knowledge that the artist, perhaps, is still learning to process herself.

For Goodell, time is cyclical—an ever-shifting loop in which the past and present remain in continuous conversation. She describes her process as “looking down into an imagined garden of the mind, the architecture of the psyche,” where each mark naturally calls forth the next. Working entirely improvisationally, her mark making does not abide to pre-planned designation, but emerges through a choreography of instinct and response. Drawn to opposites and “unlikely alliances,” she approaches painting as a site where contradictions can coexist, and where history and immediacy merge into a single pulsation. Through both destructive and additive gestures, layers of paint simultaneously fight their way to the surface and reveal ghostly traces of process that linger beneath. 

Simply, Goodell’s paintings stand as records of being — a visual proclamation of her own words: “I am here. I exist, for now.”

Tituba’s Spell, 2024. Flashe, dye, ink, acrylic on linen. 70 x 45 in. Photo courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Autumn Lin

Inspired by the story of an enslaved Indigenous woman whose coerced confession helped ignite the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, Tituba’s Spell (2024) takes its cue from histories of control and resistance. Veils of pink and drifting illegible marks oscillate between declaration and whisper, invoking a coexistence of fearlessness and anxiety. Goodell imagines these as the feelings that might have gripped Tituba as she confessed to witchcraft and communication with Satan before the Salem magistrates in order to save her life. Channeling psychic and historical residue rather than directly depicting it, Goodell aligns with the Surrealists who practiced automatism, and, especially seen in this example, allows spontaneity to take precedence over formal control until her canvases begin to register her unconsciousness. Goodell explained that she paints much like her hand would hover over a Ouija board, allowing chance occurrences and intuitive sensations to gracefully guide the movement of her marks.

Tituba’s Spell finds its somber counterpart in Cipher (2025) – two works originally conceived as a diptych, with the latter now seemingly lamenting their separation. Executed with flashe, dye, and acrylic, its muted and absorptive palette is as elegiac as it is devoid of luster. Through its tonal compression, the painting translated the invisible notion of mourning into form, and (at least for me) carried a chilling discomfort when I stood in front of it. If the task here was to decipher the spectrum of grief’s hues, Goodell has passed with dying colors.

Mouvemente, 2024. Dye, shellac ink, acrylic on linen. 72 x 60 in. Photo courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Autumn Lin

Mouvemente (2024) suspends, pushes, pulls, teases, and tightens an overwhelming stampede of energy. Strokes of metallic shellac glint across its linen surface, and animate an agitated yet poised field of flux. Goodell admitted she never stepped back while painting this particular work—her close proximity perhaps the cause of Mouvemente’s dizzying and mindless sense of rush. Familiar motifs surface unconsciously, and while its looping marks could echo Twombly’s scrawls, Goodell’s intent diverges. His gestures orbited language and history, while hers emerge from instinct, are grounded in sensation, and reference feeling rather than thought. Despite its restlessness, Mouvemente layers notes of optimism through its warm, buoyant palette and, with such delight, suggests that movement itself can quiet the mind’s unease. 

In stark contrast, Coming Back (2025) retreats into stillness. Its pared-down surface marks a return to clarity, a brief breath that offers In the Darkness I See its only faintly ominous yet generous moment of respite.

Debris of Ancestors, 2024. Flashe, shellac ink, acrylic on linen. 72 x 60 in. Photo courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Autumn Lin

The excavative Debris of Ancestors (2024) brings into view a site where inherited joys and traumas converge. Flecks of electric blue paint pierce its surface and enliven an otherwise earthy, ground-toned background. The title evokes accumulation and sedimentation, discards of the discardable, and an archive of the artist's arrival. The work reflects on how memory takes form, and traces what endures or dissolves across the branching timelines of lineage. Goodell’s engagement with ancestry is also explicit in The Repetition of Darkness (for William Goodell) (2025). Dedicated to a long-lost relative, William Goodell—a fierce abolitionist who ran for president in the 1850s—the work’s pointillistic agitation and scratched passages evolve into a biographical allegory. The painting vibrates with ambivalence toward imposed virtue, heroism, and moral obligation. “He’d be rolling in his grave right about now,” Goodell quipped.

The Night Belongs to Lovers, 2025. Flashe and acrylic on canvas. 90 x 80 in. Photo courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Autumn Lin

Temporal boundaries dissolve entirely in One Thousand Years from Now (2025), a work inspired by the pond and forest near Goodell’s home in New Paltz. Thin, wet-on-wet layers blur any fixed horizon, creating a fluidity that feels closer to meditation than to landscape. Duration becomes atmosphere, with water and air merging into a quiet green expanse that drifts somewhere between dystopia and utopia.

A similar contemplative register deepens in The Night Belongs to Lovers (2025), painted during one of the artist’s extended nocturnal studio sessions. Sensual, the work privileges touch over sight, and aligns the act of painting itself with erotic cognition. There is a seductive airiness that glows from the work’s tossing and turning strokes, charged with the intimacy of a long night’s labor. Titled after Patti Smith’s 1978 song Because the Night, the painting shares an atmosphere of both tenderness and unrest, where desire flickers between exhaustion, reverie but never regret. 

Painting by painting, In the Darkness I See builds a diary of time, matter, and consciousness. Its fourteen works translate sensation, idealize time, romanticize presence, and serve as instruments of rumination. Together, they confront the familiar yet profound ideas that grieving may be synonymous with learning, and that time, whether linear or cyclical, has the power to heal. They also pose a further question: how can a painting reach the conscience? Goodell’s questions and answers remain unfixed, as open as her viewers’ projections, and as each gesture slips beyond her conscious control, the paintings assume a strange autonomy, as if to think, breathe, and exist for themselves.