Joe Goode

Joe Goode (né Jose Bueno;[3] born March 23, 1937), is an American visual artist, known for his pop art paintings.

Goode made a name for himself in Los Angeles, California, through his cloud imagery and milk bottle paintings which were associated with the Pop Art movement.

The two would sketch various actors on screen when the family got a television and Goode would attempt to emulate his father’s ability to capture likenesses.

[5] Goode had little ambition and little cultural exposure as a child, but upon leaving high school he to move to Los Angeles.

The American pop scene had a fascination with modern consumer culture and utilized the subject matter in many of their works.

[11] “Common Objects” was curated by Walter Hopps and is considered the first museum show in the United States to exhibit Pop Art.

Composed of thickly painted canvases and milk bottles, Goode's two works draw inspiration from Surrealism and Assemblage.

[15] Goode’s style vacillates between both traditional and non-traditional forms of media which allows him to tow the line between representational art and abstraction.

[16] His tendency of rending or tearing away a superficial canvas to expose another painting below also furthered this desire to show a different way of seeing the world.

[16] His early works draw inspiration from artists such as Robert Irwin, who taught Goode at the Chouinard Art Institute.

The artist describes coming home one morning after working a night shift and seeing milk bottles on his doorstep waiting for the milkman to collect.

[17] Prior to these large scale paintings he was creating small drawings marking a dramatic shift in his art making.

Goode speaks on a specific painting in this series called Leroy thatmeasured roughly ten feet with three milk bottles represented.

Made up of wood and cheap carpeting, these staircases, like the Milk Bottles series, evoke a feeling of suburban, small-town America.

[18][19] Clouds is thought to be the height of Goode's artistic career and the paintings in this series harken back to Romanticism.

[17] Goode saw his Clouds series featured prominently by Hans Neuendorf in his galleries in Hamburg and Cologne, Germany.

In 1971, Neuendorf displayed Goode's Photo Cloud paintings at his two galleries, and in 1972, the Torn Skypaintings were exhibited in Cologne.