the beguiling world of bobbie
godwin
at 88, a hollin hills painter lives a life immersed in art
by stephen brookes | photography by michael soluri
Since moving to Hollin Hills six decades ago, the abstract painter Barbara “Bobbie” Godwin has been at the heart of the art scene here. Now, at 88, she continues to paint, creating vivid, enchanting works that grab the imagination — and don’t let go.
Untitled, 2020
Bobbie Godwin is standing in front of a huge abstract painting in her living room, staring into it intently. The thing is astonishing — a whirlwind of colors, gestures, half-formed faces, dreamlike creatures and strange, kaleidoscopic shapes that surge exuberantly across the canvas. Captivating, beautiful and wildly alive, it grabs you from across the room and slowly pulls you in, deeper and deeper into an enchanted world — a landscape of the imagination that could only have been conjured up by a particularly beguiling and unusual mind.
Godwin in her studio
And the owner of that beguiling mind, of course, is Godwin herself. A working artist who still — at 88 — spends several days a week in her studio, she dresses in long flowing robes she makes herself, eschews the internet, tends a lush and wildlife-filled garden, listens to free jazz, and once — when she wanted more light on one of her sculptures — just climbed onto the roof and cut herself a skylight.
Which is maybe just what you do when you have Godwin’s kind of relentless creativity. From the moment you walk through her front door — painted with the same detail and vitality as her canvases — you know you’re no longer in the ordinary world. Everywhere you turn are fantastical paintings and sculptures, from the wall-sized “Terpsichore” (a painting made from 70 different panels, some of which she painted with her toes), to a 12-foot-tall ceramic fountain she built (and which has a pair of fish swimming happily at its base), to sculptures by her two daughters and paintings by her late husband, Bob. Shelves overflow with books on art and poetry, a gargoyle grins from a bedside table, and even the shimmering kitchen floor — which she built herself from small blocks of wood — qualifies unquestionably as art.
But most striking of all are Godwin’s paintings. They’re everywhere. They hang on the walls, they’re propped up on cabinets, and there’s usually one on the large easel in the living room where she contemplates new work — so many canvases, in fact, that dozens more have to be stored away in racks. And as you move from room to room, discovering a new work around every corner, they all seem to resonate and connect with each other in a kind of freewheeling conversation. And for all their obvious virtuosity, they also have a feeling of being completely spontaneous and free — which makes sense, since that’s exactly how she works.
“When I start a painting,” says Godwin, glancing up from the huge work in her living room, “if I have an idea about what I'm going to paint, I let it go. I just let it go.
“And then I put something down,” she says. “A color will call me, or I'll just start doing lines until there's something on the canvas, and then I can start playing with it. The color will lead me, and the image comes as the thing develops. I never know what the next step will be.
“And somehow,” she says with a laugh, “it turns into a painting.”
“A color will call me,” says the artist
Discovering Art
Godwin’s path to becoming an artist was never easy — but it may have been inevitable. Raised on a farm in Kansas to a family she says was “not at all artistic,” her father died when she was only four. But as a young girl in the 1940s, she moved to New York with her mother, and discovered the still-quite-new Museum of Modern Art. By the time she was twelve, she was taking the bus there on her own to absorb the new art — cubism, surrealism, the early abstract expressionists and more. And something took hold.
“MOMA was a compact, smallish building, not like it is now,” she remembers. “And it was jammed with the most incredible art. There was nobody there, and that's what you need to really look at a painting. Nobody told me what these paintings were, and some of them I couldn't quite figure out — but I knew they were wonderful.
“So I learned art as a primary language all by myself,” she says. “I could just get into it without having to think what somebody else thought about it, which was a tremendous advantage.”
But the next step — becoming a painter herself — seemed out of the question. “I knew that I could never be a painter, because these paintings were all done by men,” she says. “And they were gods.”
Godwin in New York, age 12
So Godwin embarked on a sensible life, instead. She became a nurse, moved to Washington, married a psychiatrist, divorced the psychiatrist, married her second husband, Don Gilman, started a family— and took art classes when she could find a spare moment.
“I had to steal time for it,” she says. “I took classes at American University, and we had a group at the Smithsonian, where we would go in the basement after hours, and hire a model, that kind of thing.”
Life and Art in Hollin Hills
Then, one day in 1963, she and her husband stumbled onto Hollin Hills while house-hunting. It turned out to be a life-changing afternoon.
“We came out to Kirkside to look at a house, and I thought: ‘oh God, Good Housekeeping and a little frilly apron and high-heeled shoes — I can't do it! It’s awful!’” she remembers.
“And the next house we saw was a model house in Hollin Hills, all furnished in this wonderful modern furniture, with the light coming in. And I thought, ‘this is it.’ Don said, ‘well, we'll go home and think about it.’ And I said, ‘I’m not getting in the car until you put a down payment!’”
Detail from one of Godwin’s ceramic fountains.
Godwin’s son Chris was born two days after they moved in, and their family grew. She loved Hollin Hills; “I’ve always felt so free here — you can be whoever it is you are,” she says. But the marriage struggled, and she and Gilman eventually divorced (amicably — they’re still close friends). She didn’t want to go back to nursing, and as she cast around for what to do next, was intrigued by the success of one of her neighbors, the acclaimed potter Solveig Cox.
“I had this fantasy that I could make a living as a potter,” she says. “Solveig taught me how to throw a pot, and I got the wheel and started. But it turned out that I have no business sense — and I’m not a great potter!” she says, laughing.
With pottery a bust, Godwin returned to nursing — and to painting.
“I didn't have a studio at that time, so I painted here,” she says, motioning at the easel in her living room. “I painted when the kids were little, and one time I backed up to look at the painting — and I tripped over my son, who was sound asleep on the floor behind. I was filled with guilt over that.
“But my kids understood,” she adds, with a quiet smile. “When I would get cranky, one of them would say, ‘Mom, go and paint!’”
As it turned out, Hollin Hills in those first decades was a particularly good place to be (or become) an artist. In addition to potters like Solveig Cox, there were so many well-known painters and sculptors —Kathleen and Frank Spagnolo, Hilda Thorpe, Ina Schechter, Jerry Clapsaddle, Pat Monk, Jolande Goldberg, Catherine Hunt and dozens more — that Hollin Hills was once referred to in the press as a “virtual artists’ colony.”
Despite being a young mother and working full time as a nurse, Godwin would get together with other Hollin Hills artists to talk about their art, occasionally pooling funds to hire a neighborhood model. (“People would come and peek in the window when she posed,” she says with a laugh.)
It all contributed to a heady, bohemian atmosphere that Godwin’s daughter Jennifer Gilman described many years later. There was “art everywhere” in the Hollin Hills of her childhood, she wrote. “Bad art, good art. As if it grew naturally. As if it were normal. As if that’s what life had to offer.”
Bob Godwin and Gallery K
Then Godwin’s life — and her art — took a new turn. Her neighbor Bob Godwin, a high-level CIA officer and gifted abstract painter, had begun to show a sudden interest in Bobbie’s work.
“He would come around and look at my paintings,” she says. “But it wasn't because my paintings were so brilliant — it was because he was interested in me! It took me a long time to figure out that I was being courted.”
They eventually married, and the relationship had an influence on her art. She began painting in a more abstract style, refining and developing her work.
“My teacher told me that you paint a thousand paintings, and put them under the bed — you don't expect anything for the first thousand paintings,” she says. “And I did that! When Bob moved in, he said, ‘why do you have all these paintings under the bed?’”
Bob decided he wanted to be represented by Gallery K, an influential new gallery on P Street in the District — which, as it happened, was owned by Marc Moyens and Komei Wachi, fellow Hollin Hillers who lived on Paul Spring Road.
Gallery K was becoming a powerhouse of contemporary art. Moyens and Wachi had put together an impressive inventory of work by Andy Warhol, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and other art-world heavy hitters, but they also represented lesser-known artists like Hollin Hills painter Hilda Thorpe. Minnie Odoroff, a gifted collector and art appraiser who lived on Rebecca Drive, worked for the gallery as well.
So when Gallery K agreed to represent Bob Godwin — and later to represent Bobbie, too — it was a major leap forward for both of them. She had rarely exhibited her work, and never been connected with a major gallery until then.
“I was afraid of the gallery,” she remembers. “I felt like I was in over my head with the whole thing. It was wonderful to have a solo show and see my paintings all perfectly hung and perfectly lit, but I was terrified that nothing would sell, and that I'd get thrown out of the gallery.
“But it did sell. And it was thrilling.”
Terpsichore, from 1994, first exhibited at Gallery K
Bobbie and Komei Wachi at Gallery K, 1998
Her art sold well — she would have a solo show every two or three years — and she took on other work, including the spectacular floor-to-ceiling ceramic fountain in her home that she originally made for a doctor’s office, but which splashed water all over the floor the first time it was turned on. (“It’s lucky it works as a sculpture,” she says drily, “because it’s a complete failure as a fountain.” ) And after Bob’s death in 1986, she continued to exhibit with Gallery K until it closed in 2003, when both Moyens and Wachi passed away within a month of each other.
Godwin’s life has quieted down since then. But with her children grown — Valerie and Jennifer both becoming artists — she continues to work, and now spends three days a week in her studio, creating abstract works that often include unusual and sometimes quasi-mythical creatures, which seem to arise out of her imagination on their own.
Ask her about that, and she gives you a mischievous grin. “Have I told you about the Mickey Mouse Theory of Abstract Art?” she asks.
“When I started painting abstract,” she explains, “I would finish a painting, and then somebody would come and say, ‘oh, there's Mickey Mouse! I can see the ears right up there!’ And that would make me mad. So I would have to kill the Mouse.
“But later, when I began to find creatures in my work, I thought, well — either I can let them live, or I can smash them. And now, some of these paintings are habitats for small creatures,” she adds. “The eye has to be able to move comfortably through the painting, so I make myself very small and I wander around in there. I find little paths to walk through, and I climb around.”
And on the days she’s not painting, she says, she’s in her garden (which is as colorful and full of life as her art), observing the world around her.
“I watch all these forms that you see in nature, like how vines turn and twist,” she says. “The things I see in nature go into me in some way, and come out when I'm painting, but in a different way. Not as a landscape, but as just a little gesture that I've picked up somewhere. The way the edges of ice look as it melts in a puddle, or the way something is waving in the breeze. The way a drop is falling off a leaf, that kind of thing. And it it becomes the language I use when I paint.”
Godwin lives quietly now, cheerfully lending her work out to anyone interested; in fact, she won’t sell a painting unless the collector has lived with it in their home for at least a month. And she continues, season after season, to absorb ideas from nature and to create new worlds in her studio.
“I’m still going strong,” she says. “I’m slow — but I like slow. I sit, and I watch. And I paint.”
—Stephen Brookes, June 2024
stephen brookes is a journalist in hollin hills whose work has been published in the washington post, newsweek, asia times, the chicago tribune, the far eastern economic review, architectural digest, modernism magazine and many others.
michael soluri is a new homeowner in hollin hills, and is a widely published and exhibited documentary and portrait photographer, speaker and author of Infinite Worlds: The People and Places of Space Exploration.