Welcome to the Interior World of Roger Goldenberg Voices - Portsmouth Herald, Tuesday, November 6, 1996 by Jared O'Connor

You enter slowly, through the form of a window, which opens onto a landscape of violently interlocking shades and half-realized figures all vying for attention. It seems indecipherable, impossible to find meaning amid the chaos, but soon a subtle order emerges from the seemingly random brush strokes. Here a brand of crimson is skirted by a cooling ribbon of cyan; there a slash of yellow edges a bold white space to buttress a window sash of peacock green; the sash pours feathers of burgundy into another scene within the landscape.

Welcome to the interior world of Roger Goldenberg.

His studio at the Button Factory is tidy, well-lit, and organized. Roger himself is intelligent, gently articulate, and soft-spoken. All this stands in stark contrast to his painting, which is an orchestrated explosion of color, texture, and form.

The paradox at the heart of Roger's work is the extraordinary amount of time and contemplation that is devoted to exploring on canvas the hurried pace of modern life, and it is ironic that so much reasoned work elicits such a visceral response. "I want my art to speak to the present as well as the future. In my paintings I'm trying to reflect the transiency I have felt in my life—a lot of change, a lot of loss, a lot of growth."

"In thinking of art of the past, it generally was creating a moment frozen in time—whether it was a portrait or a landscape—and that just doesn't speak to our times; it doesn't represent the feeling of our present-day world, which is very fast paced. It also doesn't reflect the way our minds work. Whether it's a memory of a day somewhere, or having been on a mountaintop—memory is a collage of images."

Memory is nonlinear and highlights moments in time that are relevant, blurring the hours and days when little of consequence has happened. Roger's work is so visually arresting because it is the snapshot of a mindscape. Sifting out the irrelevant, he puts to canvas only the bright instants and bursts of feeling that the painting dictates.

Edgar Allen Poe once said of his short stories that he worked diligently to guarantee every word reflected the mood of the piece. Roger does the same with his brush strokes. He deliberates over every dab or swath of color in the maelstrom as he converses with the canvas. And conversation, on multiple levels, is what these works inspire, suggest, and even require.

Much of this is inspired by Roger's love for jazz, which he listens to while painting, and whose improvisational aspects provide a near-perfect inspiration and metaphor for his work. In jazz, the musicians agree on a chord structure and then converse with each other through their instruments over that structure, inventing melodic lines as they go. The process by which Roger creates is remarkably similar.

"I'll be thinking of a palette that I would like to explore, and these recent shaped canvasses indicate certain gestural moves I make with a brush or a palette knife. On a subconscious level, it's a guide as I'm beginning to compose a painting. I try to capture a mood, and then as the painting develops it starts to speak. I have a conversation with the painting, and it starts dictating what it needs to make some order of the chaos or to make sense of the mood I'm trying to create. And, in that sense, it's very much like jazz improvisation. You're playing in a certain key, you have the color of the instruments working on an intuitive and emotional level. It's a slower process than music. I make some marks and then step back and consider them. But I think the music is a motivating force, and it also creates energy or adds to the energy I have while painting."

Not only does Roger communicate with his work, but his work also speaks to itself. Densely textured patterns commune with spare lines, blacks refute indigoes, yellows praise themselves. But the conversation does not stop there. One of the beauties of abstract art is that perspective and form, while suggested by the artist, belong to the viewer. The painting affects you in ways that must be filtered first through your own experience. It is this interaction that completes the cycle of dialogue. Some see tree forms, some see highways.

What Roger has brought to the painting is only half the experience. What you bring, and what the work brings out in you is the other half. This is somewhat true for all art, but abstract expressionism faces that reality and even demands it.

Art doesn't cease the moment it is hung on a wall. What begins with a canvas ends only when a viewer reacts to it. The stronger the reaction, the better we say a piece is. A painting that is technically perfect but fails to move us falls short of being great art, and Roger has studied long to bring his craft to the point where he can expertly fuse emotion with color, mood with form.

"I feel that I'm just beginning to establish myself as an accomplished artist. Many artists don't think deeply enough, at an intuitive, spiritual level, where I think the uniqueness and the particular voice of the artist exists. I believe it takes a very meditative, deep awareness before art really speaks."

After receiving his bachelor in fine arts from the University of New Hampshire, Roger went to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro for his masters, which he earned in 1995. Having immersed himself in the arts for seven years, he came to Portsmouth to begin his career as a professional painter. Roger now teaches a drawing class at UNH to supplement his income, but his heart belongs to oil paint and canvas, a passion he relates clearly in his work. . . . He is perfecting his craft, continuing the process of self-discovery through art. His current work displays the strong metaphor of window imagery.

"I've always tried to work with that idea in my paintings and to create vignettes of images that speak on a subconscious level. You may have a sense of a landscape through a window, and I'm hoping it makes the viewer respond to that feeling—looking into another space or another room or dimension."

"At one point I questioned, why do windows have to be square? So I started fooling with circular openings that evolved out of realistic interior spaces and have become abstract and more dense, congested and flatter. My recent work is becoming more organic, and tree forms are emerging. I'm not sure exactly where the need or desire to make that form comes from. It's all part of the search, but there's still the idea of a dance of images and metaphors for conversation. I think the call and response that goes on in jazz enters in, which I respond to from listening."

Like the best of jazz, these paintings are a spontaneous overflow of emotion captured on canvas instead of vinyl or CD. But like good jazz, can be savored and wondered at for being an expansive, improvised study of a mood.

Roger Goldenberg is a serious contemporary artist whose work deserves serious attention. He will not be showing Portsmouth anytime soon, but if you would like the chance to converse with either the man or his bold, challenging work, he's willing to set up appointments by phone (603-303-4078) for viewings at his private studio at the Button Factory. Or e-mail him at roger@rgpaints.com

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