Joseph Goldberg
1947-2017
On his mother: “I started drawing because she did, but I taught myself to paint.”
—Joseph Goldberg: Jeweled Earth by Nathan Kernan and Regina Hackett. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.
Joseph Goldberg built a reputation in Seattle during the 1970s and 1980s making abstract, luminous encaustic paintings. An avid agate collector, he and his artist friend Wesley Wehr would “…rent a car and drive to Oregon or California, visiting agate collectors and dealers. The small little agate shops, we’d pull into every one we saw… I wanted to get that same translucency in the waxes that are in those agates. I was very much influenced by agates.”*
The first time Goldberg sold a painting for several thousand dollars he bought a pickup, filled it with his belongings and left for the dry expanses of eastern Washington. He kept a studio near Soap Lake for sixteen years and currently lives and works near Harrington, Washington. Raised in the Spokane Valley, he takes inspiration from the landscape he grew up in. “Deserts have that sense of space that I keep trying to get. In 2006 I started to use space as the subject of painting, space pushing everything else to the edge. One way or another, everything I do ends up being a landscape.”*
*Joseph Goldberg: Jeweled Earth by Nathan Kernan and Regina Hackett. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007
- Studied painting, University of Washington, 1965–1968
- Betty Bowen Award, Seattle Art Museum, 1980
- Retrospective, Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Washington, 2007
- Represented in 28 public collections, including: Brooklyn Museum of Fine Art, New York; Carpenter Art Galleries, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; and Seattle Art Museum
Fishing Lanes
“You make marks. One requires another to balance it out. A painting is an experiment that suggests other experiments.”
—“Joseph Goldberg’s New Encaustic Paintings Glow with a Mute Radiance” by Regina Hacket. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. October 9, 2008
1988
encaustic on linen
Museum Purchase, Works from the Heart Acquistion Fund, 1988
Accession Number 3308.1
Trout Water #2
Encaustic is an ancient process that involves imbedding pigment in layers of wax.
Goldberg taught himself to paint an image using water-based paint on a layer of hardened wax. Heating the surface of each layer as it is built draws the pigment into the wax creating jewel-like transparencies.
1985
encaustic on linen and board
Gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group and Washington Art Consortium, 2010
Accession Number 4234.14
Untitled
Goldberg says his work from the late 1960s looked like, “Small little fantasy landscapes in crayon. Houses, ponds, and a spider sky. It was personal, nature inspired work, work with a little fantasy. They’re psychological landscapes. Still to this day my drawings are similar in that respect. Interior landscapes could describe both my abstract and figurative work. Nothing’s changed in a funny kind of way. When I was still a student, I began to see the potential of wax, its luminosity. By 1970, I’d begun to experiment with it.”
—Joseph Goldberg: Jeweled Earth by Nathan Kernan and Regina Hackett. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007
1968
colored pencil on paper
Gift of Wesley Wehr, 1990
Accession Number 3474.3
Untitled
Goldberg says his work from the late 1960s looked like, “Small little fantasy landscapes in crayon. Houses, ponds, and a spider sky. It was personal, nature inspired work, work with a little fantasy. They’re psychological landscapes. Still to this day my drawings are similar in that respect. Interior landscapes could describe both my abstract and figurative work. Nothing’s changed in a funny kind of way. When I was still a student, I began to see the potential of wax, its luminosity. By 1970, I’d begun to experiment with it.”
—Joseph Goldberg: Jeweled Earth by Nathan Kernan and Regina Hackett. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007
1991
charcoal and wax on paper
Gift of Wesley Wehr, 1991
Accession Number 3581.1
Untitled
Goldberg says his work from the late 1960s looked like, “Small little fantasy landscapes in crayon. Houses, ponds, and a spider sky. It was personal, nature inspired work, work with a little fantasy. They’re psychological landscapes. Still to this day my drawings are similar in that respect. Interior landscapes could describe both my abstract and figurative work. Nothing’s changed in a funny kind of way. When I was still a student, I began to see the potential of wax, its luminosity. By 1970, I’d begun to experiment with it."
—Joseph Goldberg: Jeweled Earth by Nathan Kernan and Regina Hackett. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007
1968
colored pencil on paper
Gift of Wesley Wehr, 1990
Accession Number 3474.2