The Group of Goop

Lisa Liusz Senio might be best known for her work in pastels and her altered book projects. This leads me to wonder what she’s doing with the Goop of Seven.

“In a way, it’s in the same vein because my work is very layered,” she began. “It wasn’t a stretch. They saw how I worked in layers. I’ve always dabbled in acrylics. It was actually a good fit.”

The artist has always been keen on abstract works too, so if you see things that aren’t really in her work, well, that’s just the artist being good at what she does.

One of her works in The Fine Line Between ___ (sic), the Goop group’s new exhibit at VASA, is called Rambling 4. It would otherwise be called an abstract landscape but I can’t help but point out that the red arc of the sunset reflected on the foreground looks strikingly like a big pair of lips Ĺ• la Rolling Stones.

“It was intended to be a landscape but if you see lips in it, that’s fantastic!” she laughed.

The Goop of Seven is actually a group of more than 10 local painters all collaborating by contributing toward a larger body of work using “goopy, drippy, and impasto media,” according to its website at goopofseven.wordpress.com.

This time around, it’s a bona fide group of seven Goopers as a few of the fold had to bow out of submissions.

“There’s seven in the Goop of Seven!” enthused Miles Constable.

“We’re actually legit this time,” joked Connie Osgood.

The Fine Line is also a far more cohesive exhibit show than they’ve put forward in the past. Each piece shares a common size, aspect, and orientation (24” x 36” with a 10” horizon line, all hung portrait style) as well as connection points on each side of each painting. These connection points then form a continuous horizon that stretches around the gallery to offer the illusion of an infinite landscape.

Peter Gegolick said that the limits didn’t really restrict his artistic sensibilities. He still came forward and took a lot of creative risks, playing around as he always does, not the least of which is in the repertoire of painterly tools hiding in his toolbox. It looks like he brought out the tiling trowel this time.

“Anytime I go to a hardware store or anywhere that I know there’s going to be big tools, I go out of my way to find weird stuff to use.”

A trowel? Sure. The group’s unofficial motto was always “lay it on thick” with acrylic ‘goop’ in some form or another. That doesn’t always mean that the medium is just slathered on. Gegolick’s work includes one with outright three-dimensional Styrofoam pyramids affixed and painted right on the surface of the canvas while Constable prefers a touch of spray paint for a thin background.

“The original concept was that it would be thick and liquid looking goopy styles of paint,” he noted, “but considering the fact that we’re a bunch of artists which is like herding cats, we can go in our own directions after a bit.”

“We were trying to come up with a more cohesive show while trying to maintain a certain amount of individuality.”

Osgood achieves her own individuality with a simple still life of a vase of poppies. While the container nearly muddled up the horizon line, she masterfully blended it in to become distorted and nearly invisible unless you realize that’s what it is that the flowers are standing out of.

This is, indeed, a stand out show from a rising collective. Look out for them more in the very near future as they have exhibits on the schedule for Scotia Place within the next few months and the Naess Gallery next year.