In deep winter when the sun barely sneaks above the horizon and all is dark, gloomy and gray, Alaska appears stark and colorless. Let the pulse of the far north flow through Jo Going, and drab, brown animals and muted green forests burst forth in bright, tropical colors.
Photographer: Michael Armstrong, Homer News
Jo Going at her exhibit, "Close Encounters," opening this week at the Pratt Museum.
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Standing by "Close Encounters: Meetings with Animals and Spirit Beings of Kachemak Bay," her exhibit opening this week at the Pratt Museum, Going gestures at her paintings and large sculptures. Blue moose, purple wolves, green wolves, fluorescent-orange foxes: her perception of the Alaska natural world explodes with color. Birch branches, bones and toy figurines support and decorate flat, painted panels. And everywhere colored lights surround and highlight her exhibit. Going's art starts with the far north and goes beyond it.
"When it goes through my filters, this is how it comes out," she said.
"Close Encounters" opened Tuesday with the annual meeting of the Homer Society of Natural History at the Pratt. An opening reception is from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, with an artist's talk at 6 p.m.
Like much of Going's previous work seen in earlier or group shows at Bunnell Street Gallery and the Homer Council on the Arts "Close Encounters" might at first seem abstract or cubist, like Pablo Picasso crossed with Alvin Amason. All the works are paintings on canvas, even though the canvas might be cut out and glued on plywood pieces. Its subject matter of Kachemak Bay's ocean, tidal and land life fits in with the Pratt Museum's mission to explore the natural environment and human experience of the Homer area, Going said.
Going, 61, has lived in Homer since 2004, and in Alaska since 1983. Like most Homer artists, she does more than just art: teaching yoga and dance, writing and practicing energy healing. She came to Alaska to be with the poet, John Haines, and lived on his homestead near Mile 68 Richardson Highway south of Fairbanks. Going moved to Homer from Paxson at a time when she felt the need to go somewhere else maybe even leave Alaska. She sought spiritual guidance, and received a strong message to move to Homer, a place she had only seen once before, on a trip with Haines in 1985.
"It surprised me to move to Homer," Going said.
Going considers "Close Encounters" to be the closing of a chapter in her artistic development. Since growing up in New England, and after her education in New York City and Boston, Going has moved farther and farther north, first to northern New England and eventually Interior Alaska.
One obsession has been to do artist's residencies in every circumpolar region. She's been to the Alaska and Canadian high arctic, Scandinavia, Iceland and, most recently, Greenland, with a residency last summer through the Upernavik Museum.
The pull of the north comes from her Celtic roots, she said. Going is a mixture of her southern and northern heritage: the Scotch-Irish of her mother, with her strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes, and the strong Roman features of her Italian father. Now, she feels herself drawn to her Italian roots, she said. She's always traveled Outside, with residencies in Rome and Sicily. Her art will explore that southern imagery and experience more.
In some ways, that imagery is already there. In "Close Encounters," there are glimpses of non-Arctic symbols, or cross-cultural symbols: spirals, Paleolithic animal figurines, masks that could easily be African as well as Alaskan. Her ideas come from ancient as well as modern times.
"Everything in the so-called past is in the present," Going said.
Going always knew she wanted to make art she jokes that "I popped out of my mother's womb with a paintbrush in my hand." How to make a living was another matter.
"How am I going to do this?" she said. "How am I going to live?"
One answer is what she calls "a three-legged stool": grants, teaching and sale of her art. Her art has found more success Outside.
"My art tends to find a home outside Alaska," she said "I've always had a wider conceptual context of art than the regionalism of Alaska art. That's never been my bailiwick."
Schooled at Parsons School of Design, New York, and having lived in the 1960s in New York City, she's kept contacts with the art scene back east. Some Outside art critics dismiss Alaska art as too regionalist what Haines called "a dead ode to Mount McKinley."
Making a living as an artist isn't for the faint of heart, she said.
"If you don't have that passion, if you don't have that commitment, you should find something else to do," she said.
That's one thing Going has. In her four years here, she's impressed many with her passion. In his current show at the Bunnell Street Gallery of iconic Alaskans, artist Michael Walsh has painted a portrait of Going on a snare drum. That was to show she marches to the beat of a different drummer, Going said Walsh told her, but it also suggests her energy.
"Jo is a teacher and guide to all who open their hearts to her boundless energy," Walsh writes in his description of his painting.
"You have to keep going," she said. "I wake up every day as excited to go into the studio as if it's Christmas morning. It's what I do."
For images of Going's work, visit www.jogoing.net.
"Close Encounters" is on exhibit through March 30.
Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com. Aviva Hirsch assisted in interviewing Going for a school project.
