Josh Goldberg unabashedly celebrates the landscape. Pungent earth tones leap out from the black shadows everywhere in his paintings. They're abstracted visions of imaginary landscapes, veering from monumental to microscopic. His big energetic paintings conjure soaring mountains, placid pools of water and the colors of limpid skies and brilliant flowers. “Linchen Tropicus”, a buoyant composition in tropical lime, salmon and brown, could be an up-close and personal look at the jungle's plants, magnified many times over. 

Yet none of these things-mountains, flowers or cells-are decisively sketched. Goldberg's paintings are less about a real place than they are about our idea of nature, the way the landscape looks inside our heads, long after we've left it behind and returned to the city.

“A Hero's Life”, a 6-foot square canvas, conjures up the kind of heroic landscape you might find in a Wagnerian opera: a fantastical place of high peaks and dark valleys. The painting is highly structured, with carefully defined color fields of salmon, pink, gold and black, but the paint is also loose and sumptuous, with wavy lines wiggling their horizontal way across the canvas.

The hand of the artist is everywhere in evidence. Sometimes he paints wet, sometimes dry. His wide brush leaves furrows of paint across the surfaces, and drips of color cascade downward. In the works on paper, the colors are even more vivid, if possible, pooling on the surface. Quick brush lines of black paint look like Chinese calligraphy, and help endow all the landscapes with an Asian sense of the sacred.


Excerpted from “Nature Fights Back”, a review by Margaret Regan
Tucson Weekly, March 31-April 9, 2005

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