Damian Goidich is an artist and educator from the United States. A former freelance
Illustrator and contemporary Fine Artist, he works primarily through the medium of
drawing with occasional forays into painting and mixed media applications. The themes of his art are interpretive exercises regarding the curious inner world of the human mind.
These explorations attempt to reveal states of mind not readily identifiable; to unearth the emotional turmoil and philosophical contradictions simmering just below surface of the subjects; to expose them in all their glorious disorder.
‘The Little Things series has its roots in my fascination with historical imagery and its
connection to collective memory. At the time of the series initial creation I was
experimenting with a mixed media application on drafting film, choosing subjects from my reference library of 19th century photographs and daguerreotypes I felt aesthetically
mirrored my visual investigation.
As each drawing was completed and a new one begun, I found myself asking questions about the people I was drawing. Who were they in life?
What happened to them? They are anonymous entities – no documentation of name,
location or even year accompany them. Yet here they are frozen in time, recorded for
posterity yet unknowable. I find this concept fascinating, as it provokes further
philosophical questions that seem to have no ready answer.
The very nature of the human
condition is to distinguish one’s self from others, whether by personal nominative,
projected self-representation, or a desire to be recognized or affiliated with a societal
designation. The portrait photographer engages in a form of psychological ‘digging’ to
reveal some essential nature of the sitter’s character, those special qualities which make
the subject’s being so unique as to be worthy of public representation. What circumstances led them to be documented through photography? Can we truly ‘know’ a person through their image without a contextual background?
And what of the physical images themselves? Owing to the alchemic stew of chemicals used in the formative years of the photographic development process, the permanence of old photographs is volatile, transitory and fragile in nature. Many images used for the drawings have numerous scratches, spots, warping and an ever-diminishing clarity which leaves them almost undecipherable.
In many ways this proved to be a blessing: I was inspired to abandon any pretext of exacting a likeness of the subject (though there are instances in the series where I chose to remain faithful to appearances) and approach each drawing with an impressionistic attitude, reacting instinctively to what I was perceiving and putting down on the surface what I wanted to see. It has been a slow progression, but with each
successive drawing they become less grounded in reality and begin to occupy a surreal
world of their own, devoid of time and place.
