Brett Goodroad’s Paintings at Greene Naftali Respond to Landscape Genre – ARTnews.com
After earning an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007, Brett Goodroad was looking for work. Having transported grain in bulk as an adolescent, he turned to trucking, and soon fell in with Veritable Vegetable, an organic produce distributor that has been a San Francisco staple since the 1970s. Goodroad recently relocated to Arizona after spending well over a decade transporting vegetables for the company in California and the Southwest. We can imagine visions of the landscape rushing through the windshield and rearview mirrors, the weather—variable sunlight, moonlight, rain, and Bay Area fog—modulating the terrain, regularly revising the passing landscape’s palette, contrast, and sharpness. Goodroad seems to fold this experience of long drives into his slow paintings. As he reflected in 2017, “painting, like the road, is a series of compositional and emotional queues [sic] shifting and changing.”