BY LINDA DeNICOLA
Staff Writer
A new book celebrates the vibrant paintings and drawings of Nadine Dexter Goldsmith. ‘The Art of Nadine Dexter Goldsmith” has been immortalized in a 112-page coffee-table book with text by her husband, Rumson resident Barry Goldsmith.
“Diney” Goldsmith’s prolific collection of paintings and drawings is celebrated in the book, which has a forward by renowned art historian Arlene Raven.
The art book features more than 100 vivid reproductions of the late artist’s expressionistic works revealing a glimpse into Goldsmith’s passions, which included her garden, family and friends.
Raven compares Goldsmith’s style to artists such as Alice Neel, German expressionist Kathe Kollwitz and impressionist Mary Cassatt in their similar uses of tone, expressive color and bold lines. Goldsmith’s subject matter, like Neel, Kollwitz and Cassatt’s, underscores the lives of women and children. Her compositions have a female point of view that emphasize the personal and familial.
In one large 60-by-48-inch painting titled “Liza and Katie,” she painted her niece and a friend sitting in the studio watching her paint. In her expressive style, Goldsmith captured the uniqueness of each young woman.
Diney Goldsmith with her granddaughter. According to her husband, Diney loved faces.
“She would end up with big heads and run out of space and have to scrunch up the bodies,” he said. “She never repainted.”
That perspective is apparent in many of her pieces. In “Sally and Bud Dexter,” from a photograph of her parents on their wedding day, her father’s head is larger than life and his body is truncated, but his pride in his pretty wife is apparent in his smile and his stance.
On the other hand, “Richard” shows a sitting man with a large, sad face. It begs the question, why is he so sad?
“Sonny and Mary Jane” is also a large oil painting, but it is done in light green and blue washes and red-haired “Diane,” a smaller canvas, is done in brilliant primary colors.
“The Original Goldsmith Family” Goldsmith painted many portraits of older people. According to her husband, she loved the character in the face of an elderly person. She called the facial wrinkles “story lines.”
“The surfaces in her studio were covered with photographs of people she wanted to paint,” her husband wrote.
A longtime Monmouth County resident, Goldsmith began painting in her early ’40s at the Art Students League of New York. She completed several residencies at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vt., until her death at 58 years old. She and her husband founded The Goldsmith Wellness Center after she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.
In a journal entry dated April 23, 2001, she wrote, “I want this experience with cancer to be liberating … now it’s about abandonment, expression, loving and playing with myself, my family, my art, and however and whomever else I can help along the way.”
The Goldsmith family produced “The Art of Nadine Dexter Goldsmith” not only to “preserve Diney’s spirit, energy and wisdom” but to benefit the community she passionately embraced and regularly captured in her paintings, people like her oncologist.
“Pansies” A special reception was held on Feb. 16 at the Ceres Gallery in New York City and featured a talk by Grace Graupe Pillard, nationally renowned painter and Goldsmith’s longtime teacher. Graupe Pillard, who lives in Keyport and has been conducting art classes at Thompson Park for the Monmouth County Park system for almost 30 years, said Goldsmith studied with her for 10 years.
“She began in 1993 and one of her first studies was an image of a house hidden away in the woods above a large expanse of water which had personal resonance for Diney,” Graupe Pillard said. “I realized very early on that everything Diney chose to paint from this first painting on, was connected to a personal relationship in her life.”
She added: “I felt nostalgic as I reviewed the artwork in this wonderful book and remembered how the paintings evolved and the wrestling Diney had to go through with each artwork – a positive endeavor – as without the struggle we often repeat what we already know.”
“Orange Wall” Graupe Pillard said Goldsmith was a beautiful, unselfconscious woman intensely focused on her work.
“She would concentrate so hard on some parts of the anatomy, often the head, that it would get larger and larger so that the appendages had to just relax and fly off the page taking a back seat to the focused area. All this gave the paintings an immediacy and a tactile struggle that again was all too human,” she said.
Graupe Pillard confided that she misses Goldsmith, who became a friend.
“I miss her casual way of pinning up her hair, her laugh which was unique and sounded like a crow, her generosity of spirit which included great curiosity about other artists in the class, encouraging them and genuinely responding to their work,” she said.
“She made teaching more fun and more challenging. Diney had an instinct for placement of objects, and helped me design the layout of the workshop studio when the workshop moved to a new building. Her clear sense of architectural space allowed the maximum number of artists to paint comfortably and at the same time enrich the class dynamic.
“Self Portrait” “My one regret is that Diney never painted me,” Graupe Pillard added.
According to Goldsmith’s husband, Diney painted only one portrait of herself.
“She found other people more interesting and said she could never get inspired to capture herself when there were so many other interesting souls,” he writes.
The book will be available through Diney’s Place, the Children’s Cultural Center, in Red Bank, and The Wellness Community – The Diney Goldsmith Center, in Long Branch, at a cost of $125. Book sales will benefit both organizations.
 “Sarah Riding” |