Teacher and student (though not each other’s) paired for gallery show
BY LAURA RASKIN INDEPENDENT ARTS WRITER

Brian Delacey’s “What Is Not Here” will be part of his and Kevin Goodrich’s show at the Vanderbilt Gallery.

When Kevin Goodrich, 20, walked into the

Vanderbilt Gallery last summer with one painting, gallery owner Barbara Vanderbilt took it off of his hands and sold it for $2,000. Not bad for a guy who had just finished his freshman year of art school at the Pratt Institute’s Utica, N.Y. extension and had yet to take one painting course.

Goodrich, who is from Newark Valley, N.Y., rented a house on Nantucket with friends last summer, worked as a line cook and experimented with painting. Although he is at home this summer, preparing to enter a Masters degree program at the Art Institute of Chicago, Vanderbilt has given him a show with New York City and Nantucket-based artist Brian Delacey, opening Thursday, Aug. 11. In a telephone interview this week, Vanderbilt expressed her excitement over discovering Goodrich and said she enjoys fostering young tal-ent.

“I’m going to try and market (Goodrich) as a portrait painter. He does it very well,” she said.

While Goodrich was on the island, he experimented with classic Nantucket beach scenes. But his show this year, and his talent, as Vanderbilt pointed out, is unlike much of what can be found in local galleries.

Larry Clark was an inspiration for Goodrich’s portraits, which are the bulk of his show. Clark is an American photographer known for capturing youth without even a masked hint of censorship, expos-ing their unprocessed emotion, sexuality and in some cases vacant destruction. Besides his books of photography, Clark is most recently known for his con-troversial 1995 film “KIDS,” which captured all that on cellu-loid, plus drugs and violence. But it was his 1971 book “Tulsa,” of photographs of himself, friends and similar themes that Goodrich referred to.

Goodrich called Clark’s work “touching photos of American tragedy.”

While his paintings are tame in comparison, the source of inspira-tion is transparent. Goodrich took a camera along during time spent with friends, most of whom have nothing to do with any art scene (“I’m the lone soldier,” said Goodrich), and captured them in small moments. Smoking, reading, sleeping, looking Goodrich is an accurate figura-tive painter, but somber too.

“I think I’ve exposed a really vulnerable moment,” he said. “It does tend to be on the melancholy side. I’m okay with that. Alot of stuff doesn’t seem to have a context anymore.”

Goodrich is not stuck on painting. “I still have many years to fool around with other stuff. It’s all really exciting right now,” he said, and he is looking forward to the Chicago blues scene.

Vanderbilt paired Goodrich and Delacey together in part because of their roles as student and teacher, although the two do not know each other. Vanderbilt has also been carrying Delacey’s work for three years.

In a telephone interview from his Nantucket house, after a 12-hour trip from Maine the day before, Delacey agreed that the pairing made sense.

“We both are using conventional subject matter in an unconventional manner,” he said.

Delacey’s landscapes, some Nantucket and some from another island in Maine, have been his own ver-sion of travel, with perspectives from behind wind-shields and manmade elements, except the roads, deleted.

The moody romance of the road calls to Delacey, who loves travel, but does not have to go far to get from his New York City apartment to the Amsterdam Avenue location of the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine where he is an art teacher for children ages six to 14.

The artist, who has a four-year-old son whose eagerness to get outside and join his cousins could be heard in the background, has been coming to Nantucket every summer since he was a child. Although it was not his connection to his job, longtime family friend and island arts figure Beverly Hall was once the photogra-pher in residence at St. John the Divine.

With degrees from Bennington College and Hunter College, Delacey has been teaching full time since 1989, which allows him summer vacations to paint. It was teaching Cathedral children – who learn in an unheard of 13 acres of medieval-style grounds and buildings in the middle of the city – about coats of arms that led him to his current style.

Delacey was obsessed with symbols and his now fairly representational paintings were once abstract shields with “lots of motion.” Wanting to head in a modern direction, Delacey honed in on road signs and was soon inventing his own, one of which can be found in the corner of “What is Not There.”

As he began to photograph roads for reference, and was fascinated by the signs and travel, he eventu-ally brought the horizon line back in to his work.

There will be an opening for Goodrich and Delacey at the Vanderbilt Gallery on Thursday, Aug. 11, from 6 to 8 p.m., 18 Federal St.

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