Goldberg was born in Seattle, April 27, 1947 and grew up in Spokane. He attended the University of Washington from 1965-1967, and began showing his work at Francine Seders Gallery in 1970 until 1976. He later exhibited with Foster/White Gallery from 1979-1992, with Woodside/Braseth Gallery from 1995-2002, and finally at Greg Kucera Gallery, from 2005 until the present time.  Goldberg was awarded the Betty Bowen Prize by the Seattle Art Museum in 1980.  Seattle Art Museum also presented his work in a one-person Documents Northwest exhibition in 1982. The Museum of Northwest Art curated an expansive retrospective of Goldberg's paintings and sculpture in 2007.  His work has also been exhibited in numerous exhibitions around the United States and abroad.  Notably, his work has been collected by the Brooklyn Art Museum; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Long Beach Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, WA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Seattle Art Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; and Wichita Art Museum among others. 

JOSEPH GOLDBERG (1947-2017)

Joseph Goldberg was born in 1947 in Seattle and raised near Spokane in Eastern Washington. He was educated at the University of Washington until he dropped out in 1968 at the encouragement of some of his teachers who knew that academic rigor wasn’t going to teach (or tame) this most natural of artists.

His first few exhibitions in the late 1960s, with Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle, revealed two separate inquiries into abstraction. At the time he was living as a caretaker in a studio that was part of the gallery and then later in the basement of Seders’ Greenwood area gallery. He was producing small landscape drawings and paintings that were somewhat surrealistic in nature. At the same moment, he was beginning the course of abstraction that would define his early career. In these first delicate works on paper, small shapes of colors floated within larger planes of color, the central shape often echoing the shapes the larger fields. They were mindful of both the Russian Suprematist work of Kasimir Malevich and the work of post-war abstract artists such as Albers, Rothko, Martin and Held. This paring down of essentials had, by the 1970s, become a direction followed by various contemporary artists. While certainly not a Minimalist, Goldberg was pursuing something akin to it in sparseness of details but different in evoking the natural world.

By 1975, these works on paper would develop into larger works in oil or wax over linen stretched over wood panels. The central floating images became striated and sometimes even gestural. A series of tall vertical paintings in the late 1970s and early 1980s suggested classical columns or stacks of rectangles within the larger rectangular plane.

Goldberg had traveled in England in 1978, staying for a month in an Elizabethan country home near Sussex, visiting ancient Roman ruins and Greek revival manors. He would later travel extensively in the western regions of the U.S., particularly the Southwest where the artist visited Zuni and Navajo reservations, Anasazi ruins and Hopi pueblos.

In 1980, Matthew Kangas said of Goldberg, “His true significance…lies in the fact that he turned his back on “mysticism” in art and squarely faced the more rewarding challenges of 20th century painting (cubism, neo-plasticism, abstract expressionism, color field painting), as routes to personal expression.”

By the early 1980s, Goldberg had perfected the technique of encaustic painting for which he would become most well-known. By mixing brilliantly hued raw pigments and minerals with translucent beeswax, Goldberg worked with a tradition of painting with wax that dates back to Greco-Romans working in Egypt in the third century. Goldberg built his painted surface with layer after layer of color and wax until a palpable luminescence is achieved. The surface was flamed and buffed developing a waxy, lustrous sheen.

In his 1981 show with Foster/White Gallery, Goldberg debuted a suite of irregularly shaped paintings in encaustic on linen over wood panels. Generally, still somewhat geometric in nature, they floated like unfurled banners or waving flags against the wall. In most of these a vaguely rhomboid panel of shimmering gray would contain an interior shape just as solid walls frame a roomful of space.

One of his most innovative shows was of true three-dimensional paintings; landscapes still but this time somewhat more urban. The remnants of architecture appear as buildings that protrude from the wall. A corner view might be held in perspective or a courtyard would be suggested by three walls.

In the mid-1980s Goldberg produced paintings that were oval shaped or had round or ovoid shapes in them suggestive of planets or their rings and moons. In the later 1980s and early 1990s a broader sense of abstraction encompassed the suggestions of trees, rural architecture, even pueblo ruins the artist had seen in the southwest.

As the work progressed through the 1990s, this expansive vision of the natural world embraced an increasingly larger scope of imagery though often reduced to its essence by a rigorously applied sensibility of abstraction. In the late 1990s, Goldberg exhibited a group of landscapes depicting the familiar forms of gorges, ridges, fields found near Soap Lake in Eastern Washington, where the artist had been living since 1984. These land, sky and waterscapes revealed that this appreciation of the natural world have been the most enduring images in Goldberg’s work. In more recent paintings, Goldberg adds elements of weather and observations of the sky to these abstracted landscapes. Lightning, to be specific, was a recurring theme in a number of works. Other paintings were overtly representational with figurative elements in the forms of silhouettes and skeletons, as well as group of haunting paintings of owls in flight. The owls grew out of Goldberg’s quite personal interactions with several owls who became familiar to him in his daily life after he moved to Harrington, about an hour west of Spokane. In some they are observers, in others they are hunters.

The paintings since 2000 have often returned to the severity of the earliest work, though now filtered through the artist’s keen sense of art historical precedence and of the grandness of nature surrounding him, often filtered through Goldberg’s earlier interests in reductive painting. Several pieces investigate a severely reduced composition—a field of rich, nuanced white is edged with small bands and rectangles of high key color intruding slightly into it. These are mindful of the late Mondrian works and also of Motherwell’s ongoing Open Series in which he would create a painted space suggestive of the openness of doors or windows without being representational. Similarly, much of Goldberg’s past and present work seems related to architecture. Suggestions of archeological relics, mosaic panels, floor plans, doors, tunnels, arches, windows and columns, have figured in nearly every body of his work.

In addition to the encaustic paintings, Goldberg created mysterious three-dimensional box sculptures. Minimal wooden boxes contained gridded compositions made of tightly strung steel wires with coke cinders attached and arranged in seemingly random compositions resembling constellations of stars or rocks strewn across a desert landscape. When viewed from directly in front of the sculptures, the viewer realizes the coke cinders are generally arranged in strictly symmetrical patterns. These also relate to paintings made in the early 2000s where small squares of color are arranged in bilateral, quadrilateral or mirrored symmetry.

I noticed if you have chaos on one side and then mirror it, on the other you end up with balance, order, and a peaceful stillness. - Joseph Goldberg

The Northwest region has so little history with reductive art that Goldberg seems a refreshing comment on a minimalist aesthetic with his newest works. Whether painting the indigo space between the glowing stars in the deep, dark night skies of Eastern Washington, or poetic suggestions of stars reflecting in the marshy water of a murky pond, Goldberg has produced a sensitively wrought body of work. In the starkest paintings, Goldberg renders the expansive white ground between disparate objects of rural detritus abandoned at the edges of a snow covered field.

A look at Goldberg’s entire career reveals him to be a peripatetic artist, circling back from time to time to meaningful images and painterly issues which have fascinated his constantly seeking curiosity. This practice also reveals the remarkable consistency of thought particular to the best of artists.

Joseph Goldberg died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident near his home in Harrington, Washington, in December 2017.

Joseph Goldberg’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA; Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane, WA; Nona Bismarck Foundation, Paris, France; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, BC; and San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Art Museum, NY; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Seattle Art Museum; Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, WA; Wichita Art Museum, KS; Long Beach Museum of Art, CA; and Municipal Museum of Dublin, Ireland; and Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, BC.

EDUCATION
1965-1968 University of Washington, Seattle

SELECTED AWARDS

1980 200 + 1 Club, Seattle
1980 Betty Bowen Memorial Award, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle

SELECTED ONE-PERSON EXHIBITIONS

2018 The Earth is a Lamp: Memorial Survey, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA
2015 Sky and Stone, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA
2012 FOCUS: Boxes and Paintings, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle
2011 Paintings, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA
2008 Paintings, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA
2007 A Retrospective, Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, WA
2005 Paintings, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA
2002 Gordon Woodside / John Braseth Gallery, Seattle (also 1999, 1997, 1995)
1992 Foster/White Gallery, Seattle (also 1990, 1989, 1988, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1980, 1979)
1987 Paintings and Drawings by Joseph Goldberg, Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA
1976 Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle (also 1975, 1972, 1971, 1970)

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2008
Surrealist Impulse: New Acquisitions, Tacoma Art Museum, WA
Meditations on the Landscape, Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane, WA
2005
Zen Momentum, Museum of Art, Washington State University, Pullman, WA
1999-2000
Bygone Modern, State Convention Center, Seattle (curated by Beth Sellars)
1999
Bumberbiennale: Painting 2000, Bumbershoot Arts Festival, Seattle Center (curated by Matthew Kangas)
1997
Safeco Collects: Northwest Art 1976-1997, Jundt Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA
Fresh Air C. 1930-97, Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, WA (curated by Barbara James)
1996
50 Years of Collecting, Tacoma Art Museum, WA
1995
Interior Idioms: The Idiosyncratic Art of Eastern Washington, Seafirst Gallery, Spokane, WA
100 Years, 100 Paintings, Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue
1994
Group Exhibition, Gordon Woodside/John Braseth Gallery, Seattle
Abstract Art from the City of Seattle Collection, Modern Art Pavilion, Seattle Center (curated by Matthew Kangas)
1993
33rd Annual Group Show Featuring NW Masters, Gordon Woodside/John Braseth Gallery, Seattle
Poncho Invitational Fine Art, Security Pacific Gallery, Seattle
1990-1995
Art Works For AIDS, Modern Art Pavilion, Seattle Center
1992-1993
The Betty Bowen Legacy: Fourteen Years of Award-winning Art, Security Pacific Gallery, Seattle
1992
Northwest Meets Southwest: The Great Modernists, William Christopher Fine Art, Tucson
Group Show, Pulliam Deffenbaugh Nugent Gallery, Portland, OR
1991
Environmental Solitude: Paintings and Drawings of Joseph Goldberg and Wesley Wehr, Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane, WA
Clay and Canvas, Contemporary Crafts Association, Portland, OR (curated by Alyce Flitcraft)
Drawing Show, Foster/White Gallery at Frederick & Nelson, Seattle
1989
Bumberbiennale: Decade of Abstraction 1979-1989, Seattle Center (curated by Matthew Kangas)
1988
Images & Latitudes, Nona Bismarck Foundation, Paris, France. Traveled To Nantes, France.
Betty Bowen Memorial Award Tenth Anniversary Exhibition, Seattle Art Museum
Contemporary Survey: A Visible Presence in the Northwest, Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane
1987
Northwest '87, Modern Art Pavilion, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle
Invitational Drawing Show, Art Center Gallery, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle
Images & Latitudes, 2030 Fifth Avenue, Seattle (curated by Sona Ellison)
1986
38th Annual Purchase Exhibition: Hassam and Speicher Fund, American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters, New York
Northwest Impressions, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle
Eccentric Satellites 1986, Seattle Center (curated by Matthew Kangas)
10/40 Anniversary Celebration, Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue
Artworks Against AIDS, Poncho Gallery, Modern Art Pavilion, Seattle Art Museum
Betty Bowen Memorial Award Group Exhibition, Seattle Art Museum
Burke Museum, University of Washington, Seattle
1982
Betty Bowen Memorial Award Exhibition, Seattle Art Museum
1976-1977 Masters of the Northwest, Seattle Art Museum
1972
Accessions Exhibition, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle
Accessions Exhibition, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, BC
1971
Centennial Exhibition, San Francisco Art Institute
Northwest Annual, Seattle Art Museum

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, BC
Brooklyn Museum of Fine Art, New York
Carpenter Art Galleries, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane, WA
Crane, Stamper, Boese, Durham & Rogers, Seattle
Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle
H.J. Heinz Corporation, Pittsburgh
Long Beach Museum of Art, CA
Management Compensation Group
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
Nordstrom, Los Angeles
Nordstrom, San Francisco
Nordstrom, Seattle
Nordstrom, Washington, DC
Oculon Corporation, Bellevue
Old Security National Bank, Seattle
Paccar Corp, Bellevue
Pacific Northwest Bell, Seattle
Safeco, Seattle
Seattle Art Museum
Seattle City Light 1% for Art, Portable Works Collection
Security Pacific Bank, Seattle
Stole Rives, Seattle
Swedish Hospital, Seattle
Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA
University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle
West One Bank, Boise
Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham
Wichita Art Museum, Wichita

Joseph Goldberg
Review by Matthew Kangas
March 15, 2015

Joseph Goldberg's new encaustic paintings glow with a mute radiance
Review by Regina hackett
October 9, 2008

Visual Arts: Striking surprises from Joseph Goldberg
by Sheila Farr, Seattle Times art critic
Entertainment & the Arts: Friday, March 11, 2005

Joseph Goldberg has come roaring back with a debut exhibit at Greg Kucera Gallery that re-establishes him as one of the region's most charismatic painters.

The new work has the resolve of the early paintings that made Goldberg a hot property when he first showed his mouth-watering encaustics in the 1970s. Since that time, Goldberg's painting has at times sparkled, at times seemed stuck, and occasionally struck out in directions that rocked his reputation. Now he's assembled a sizable show that fills the gallery with imagery that's rich and varied, while only improving on the delicious surfaces that have long been his forte.

Those who love the old Joe will have plenty to be happy about: His suave desert abstractions and fields of warm gray still sprout minimalist bands or patches. Color vents through the burnished surface like magma bubbling under a glaze of ash. The more daring paintings, such as "Constellation I" look skyward rather than across the abstracted landscape, into all-over patterns that suggest midnight accumulations of cloud in a spectrum of blues and grays - views through 1,000 miles of space. Stars appear as diamond shapes of flat white nested in black shadow. The ramped-up contrast is risky, but effective.

Such innovations make the new paintings exciting, pushing past the easy elegance that at times made Goldberg a decorator's darling of tasteful restraint. Now he's willing to dive head-on into luscious color and proves it with "Yellow Dawn" a radiant stack of horizontal bands simmering in pink - one of the most joyful images in Goldberg's oeuvre.

A Seattle native who grew up in Spokane and attended the University of Washington, Goldberg, 57, started his career in Seattle. He hit pay dirt in the 1970s, when he defined his style by working with encaustic, a mixture of heated wax and pigment that few local artists were using at that time. Since then he has become a consummate practitioner of the technique. He rode-out the faddish popularity of wax as an art material, which came and went in the 1990s, to remain the region's master of the medium. The glowing skin-smooth surfaces he creates can make you swoon.

But ravishing surfaces alone do not an artist make, and with Goldberg the biggest question mark has always been how he would progress beyond the spare images that brought him a rush of early popularity. The little floating triangles of the 1970s referenced patterns of tribal art and the pared down geometry of later paintings drew from the landscape and shapes of pueblo architecture. This show features a section of Goldberg's more representational images, which still upset those fans hooked on the abstractions. While I was viewing the show, a gallery visitor complained to Kucera that only Goldberg's abstracts were good.

I disagree. Goldberg is generating heat in the studio again. His landscape "Sage" pays tribute to the late Northwest painter Jay Steensma with its lonely outcrop of buildings and depressive barren countryside. Goldberg even manages to bend his sleek technique to resemble the slapdash watery paint that Steensma flung down. The searing-eyed "Hunter," a flying owl that startles out of thin air, speaks of Goldberg's geographical location as well as his place in Northwest art history. While alluding to Morris Graves' famous bird metaphors, "Hunter" doesn't in any way mimic them. I like Goldberg's strange skeleton paintings, too, the chalky calcium smears over a surface like rusted metal: everything in the process of decay.

The grand finale - and the big surprise - is the small selection of paintings in the back gallery. Here Goldberg rethinks the stylistic breakthroughs of earlier abstractionists Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich in paintings such as "Yellow Black."

Goldberg rekindles that pioneering minimalism, placing slim bands of color against the edges of a white ground. Yet beneath the broad expanses of white - unusual for Goldberg - teem layers and layers of smoldering color.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com

Goldberg's encaustic landscapes are worlds unto themselves
by Regina Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Art Critic
Friday, March 11, 2005

The hard transparency of Joseph Goldberg's painting is no small thing.

For three decades, he has been blow-torching his way into his version of a landscape. It is peopled with ghosts, bones and architectural ruins; the colored light of flowers in a desert, long horizon lines, blunt trees and burnished bodies of water.

Then there are his skies at night. His blues climb all over each other, and his vehement stars eat holes the dark.

Goldberg is an encaustic painter. He binds beeswax to linen by means of industrial heat and presses powdered pigments into the still-warm surfaces, using a palette knife, a brush and sometimes his fingers.

Born in Seattle in 1947, Goldberg grew up in Spokane and spent his 20s and most of his 30s in Seattle before heading back to the desert in the eastern part of the state, tired, he said, of the city's endlessly wet gray.

Thousands of years old, hot-wax paintings were rare in contemporary art when he started experimenting in the 1970s.

Besides Brice Marden and Jasper Johns, Goldberg had the medium almost to himself.

It's common now, not that Goldberg knows who's using it. His memory is saturated with vast amounts about art history, especially ancient art history, and he connects to the modern period beginning with Kazimir Malevich, but since leaving Seattle he hasn't paid much attention to the current scene.

Not that he wouldn't want to. "I'd like to see what problems other painters give themselves, and how they solve them," he said at the Greg Kucera Gallery on Saturday, looking startled that so many people showed up to hear him speak.

"It's odd," he said in an aside, "considering that I have nothing to say."

Not true, although it's true he is used to silence, the silence of the desert, the creak of his house in a high wind, the engaged play of himself in the studio, trying to render a fragment of what he has observed in nature.

The paintings in the first gallery are the most abstract, and their surfaces are thinner than usual, giving the linen grounds a silky look.

The bones in "Sand Lights" (55 inches high by 48 inches wide) are white fists pulled violently apart into horizon lines stacked six high and becoming increasingly fragmentary as they descend the canvas space.

Stare at a thing long enough, it starts to waver. Goldberg paints the uncertainty of seeing, not the moment of connection between landscape and

viewer but the moment after, when the eye no longer can frame its experience.

In "Constellation 1" and "Constellation 2," (both 52 inches high by 48 inches wide), blues that have started to crumble fold into each other, and stars, blank whites, peer out from black holes. The painter is pressing the extremes of contrast in what he realizes is a meager effort to imitate the effortless contrasts he sees daily in the desert.

In the second gallery, the land comes more clearly into focus. "Middle Thompson" (24 inches high by 34 inches wide) could be the indistinct negative of an overexposed photo achieving an improbable form of glory. Bare tree trunks are whitening verticals that look dead but sustain smeary green branches of blackened life. Ash is settling over this scene, and the lake is made of ice.

Goldberg spends most winters snowed in. The paintings in the third gallery are blanketed spaces, whites pushing everything else to the edge, where a sliver of yellow may be what's left of a tractor and a black wedge a glimpse of a barn.

With small glints of buried color, his activated empty spaces hold the ground in a cold embrace.

A few of these paintings could be tributes. Jay Steensma's elastic space informs "Sage" (24 inches high by 30 inches wide), and those are Steensma's shadow figures in "Sky Over Taos" (30 inches high by 36 inches wide). Several of the skeleton paintings evoke George Chacona's skeleton paintings, force merged with grace.

Some say the world will end in fire. Goldberg uses the fire of a propane torch to make a case for an ending in ice. After long silences and a few hit-or-miss exhibits elsewhere, he is still one of the best painters this region ever produced.

Seattle Magazine, 2005
Whether experimenting with abstract expressionism, cubism or color-field painting, Seattle-born encaustic painter Joseph Goldberg has a knack for extracting the simple, gritty essence of his subjects. Goldberg's landscape paintings of the high deserts of eastern Washington, for example, capture this environment's inherent abstract beauty, while his gray color fields, punctuated by thin strips of yellow and black, suggest foggy city streets. All in all, Goldberg is a favorite of ours and his new exhibit at the Kucera Gallery is a must-see.

Artshow: Deeper into the Visible
by Mike Rust
Review of exhibition Fresh Air C. 1930-97 at Museum of Northwest Art, 1997

Last week the newly remodeled First Street facility for LaConner's Museum of Northwest Art opened its doors, in an atmosphere that combined elements of a down-home Skagit barbecue, a school graduation, and an (urbane) northwest coast potlatch.

Local and Seattle artists drank champagne and crunched vegetables with collectors and connoisseurs from out of town, and cross-dressing farmers peered at paintings over the shoulders of ex-fishtown eco-radicals. The mood was expansive.

The new building, itself one of the stars of its own opening show, is so transformed that the work of architect Henry Klein and his design team (donated to MONA by Klein's firm) is more a redemption than a remodel. The aggressive, unrelenting commerce of La Conner in recent years had reached an apotheosis in the (former) Wilbur Building, an expensive and very ugly imposition on the town's waterfront street. However its size and location made it an ideal candidate for the museum.

The facade, which had seemed willfully brutal, has been softened by an enclosure of vertical red cedar lathe. Inside Klein created a large exhibition space on each floor and then connected them with a broad spiral stair. Above it but slightly offset, a large circular sky window allows sunlight to stream down into the building's main- floor volume. The newly unified result is clear and graceful; it also reiterates the essential and intimate relationship that northwest art continues to have with the natural world.

Curated by Barbara James the show is, despite the brochure's disclaimer, an historical anthology of northwest art. It doesn't approach exhaustiveness, of course, but does offer an opportunity to see representative pieces from some of the best artists now working. The generations born c.a. 1920s have provided recent work; particularly strong examples from among these are by Philip McCracken, Clayton James, Gaylen Hansen, and Richard Gilkey. The Tobeys, Graveses, Andersons, Tsutakawas, Iveys, Tomkinses, Horiuchis, Callahans are here (and a lovely Helmi gouache); and among the more than thirty selections from the work of these "old guys" are several so close to being masterpieces that it's unseemly to quibble. My own choice would be Morris Graves' Sea, Fish, and Constellation. Many of these works are from important private collections that are normally inaccessible. But against a background of canonical northwest works the real excitement of this show is in the work by artists who are putting themselves out there now.

Each artist was asked to write a very brief statement of aims, to be printed and mounted near his or her work. Some of these are interesting and some are not, but it was Seattle painter Paul Havas who in articulating his own credo laid out the direction and the danger. "Ever deeper into the visible," he says, "lest the conceptual become formula." The statement is cryptic but seems to mean that, if an artist wants to make something of his own, he had better not try to paint an idea. The visual is difficult, but its abandonment for the realm of the concept is a Faustian sellout. What he gives up for rote formula (which is of course always dressed in elaborate costume and called by another name) is the freshness of his own eyes.

There is no doubt that conception and formula have become boredom in some of the work in this show- I think Michael Spafford's cerebral 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is lazy, for example, and Michael Dailey's Blue Bay Night looks like it's been painted 1000 times and hangs in 1000 cool foyers. There are some artists, however, who find that their work gives them freedom. Havas has become our foremost exponent of a "painterly realism" and has incidentally almost single handedly in recent years brought mountains close up into the region's art. (Where are the mountains in the canon? Have they been overlooked?). With his increasingly complex palette Havas has, especially in this show's White Chuck Spine, managed the blurred light and subtle textures of North Cascades contours, the almost underwater look, and their vertiginous attraction, an allure that hums with an ever-so-slight undercurrent of menace. What Havas may be working toward is a painting so far into the visible that it breaks through our accustomed perceptions and unnerves us that like any real love scares us and gives us freedom at the same time.

The Joseph Goldberg selection has a related effect. His large encaustic (wax with color burned in with a torch) Trout Water #2 is an absolutely stunning painting, somehow both monumental and fragile, a geometric abstraction, but one that reports an intimate engagement with the physical world. That world continuously and everywhere gives forth geometry- a basalt column, a circle started from a moth's touch on a pond- but always in this painter's work it is a geometry made rich and imperfect by time.

Years ago another painter, seeing a (small) Goldberg for the first time, remarked to me that he's made it look like an artifact." The best of his paintings live in an element somewhere between rock and language; they make a mysterious peace between fact and message. Physical, geologic and geographic depth is one implication of Goldberg's mastery of his difficult medium; another is temporal depth. The deep spaciousness of time seems to breathe from his color.

At the other end of the building from the Havas and Goldberg paintings, on a wall to itself, is hung an enormous 1992 Richard Gilkey oil, Winter Stone. Gilkey's immediately discernible links are to Morris Graves in his fondness for emblematic figures, and the subject of this superb painting is a single white boulder, grained and fissured like an immense brain in beautifully modulated grays, browns and blacks. Parallel shafts of light or snow of varying intensities slant the ten foot width of the canvas, partially obscuring the stone and building up on its lower part a growing thickness of the snow or of some other unknown opacity. On the lower left march rows of calligraphic script, like burnt smoky ideograms liberated from the rock's own figure. I have no idea why they are there, except that they are perfect. This is one of the most beautiful Gilkeys I've seen, emotionally resonant, even elegiac, and it pushes the limits of symbolic painting without breaking them. It needs to be contemplated in the quiet that it itself produces.