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Chet Goff
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Reading the list of awards Chet Goff has received for his watercolors, one assumes the South Carolina artist benefits from extensive training and long days in his studio. How else could he produce such large, complicated, and skillfully executed pictures? The truth is that he is largely self-taught.
Goff didn't grow up around artists, galleries, or museums, so his exposure to art was limited to the few pictures he saw reproduced in textbooks and news magazines. When he exhibited a flair for drawing and painting, his parents and teachers encouraged him to study design and illustration at The Art Institute of Atlanta so he could graduate with marketable skills. Not until the 1990s, after he was well established as the advertising manager for a department store, did he discover watercolor painting. One particular painting—a large still life by Carolyn Brady in the collection of the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina—literally changed his life. "My co-workers introduced me to the art in area galleries and museums, and I began to discover paintings and artists I never knew," he recalls. "I started reading American Artist and buying books on contemporary realists, and I fell in love with Carolyn Brady's work."
With Brady as his inspiration, Goff began to immerse himself in art, attending exhibitions, reading books, and taking a course from a local still-life painter, Ann Hightower Patterson. "Because of my education in design, I had strong drawing skills and an ability to compose pictures, but I didn't have a solid understanding of color—especially the transparent colors typical of the watercolor medium," he remarks. "I was excited about learning all of that and, quite frankly, being diverted from the stress of my job."
The pressure of his job and the death of a close friend interrupted Goff's art education, but he eventually resumed his pursuit of watercolor. "Because of my deficiencies with color, I started painting monochromatic pictures with just gray and blue," he explains. "Then I gradually introduced color. By the time I was in my mid-30s, I felt that I finally understood how to effectively put color on paper."
Goff concedes that his earliest watercolors imitated Brady, but in time, he gained more confidence in his own ideas. "At first, I adapted a process I learned while studying illustration. I established clip files of images I might use in my painting—reproductions of other artists' work or photographs that might inspire me. Then I would compose those into a watercolor and copy parts of the collected images. Eventually I created my own source material by photographing tabletop arrangements of objects. Now as I create my paintings I make more adjustments in the drawings and push the colors."
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