31 Oct ARTIST SPOTLIGHTS: LINDA GLOVER GOOCH

While so many Western artists paint the region’s majestic mountains, canyons, buttes, and plains, Linda Glover Gooch turns her well-trained artist’s eye toward the skies above. The results are cloudscapes as awe-inspiring as the landscapes below. So, it may come as a surprise to learn that, not long ago, Gooch considered herself “a bright, sunny, perfect-weather plein-air painter,” particularly well-known for her Grand Canyon scenes.

All that changed in September 2017. “I was at the Grand Canyon Conservancy’s annual Celebration of Art,” Gooch recalls, “and was set up painting towards the canyon when a thunderstorm started building off to my right. I had to keep my eye on it because lightning can travel a long way, and you don’t want to be out on the rim with a metal tripod when that’s going on. And I saw this magical thunderhead. So, I wiped everything off my canvas and started painting it. From that moment, I’ve been chasing clouds.”

That marked an exciting new phase in a career that traces back to her first encounter with the medium back in the late 1960s, in the Southern California town of Yucaipa. “One day, when I was 13, I went over to a friend’s house, and his older sister had a little studio set up in the garage. I fell in love with the brushes and paints and easel, and told my mom. She bought me my first set of oils and an easel for Christmas and enrolled me in Saturday morning painting classes. That became my passion.”

Roadside Guardians | Oil on Board | 20 x 24 inches | 2024

After high school, Gooch moved to an apartment near the harbor in Oceanside, California, where she joined the local art league, took more classes, and painted and sold seascapes and still-lifes; and then to nearby Carlsbad, where she opened a studio and began offering classes herself.

She met Joe Gooch while attending a plein-air workshop at Yosemite in 1984, and they soon married and moved the following year to Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Its art scene had a big influence on me. I took classes from professionals like Ray Vinella and got into my first gallery.” The couple’s eventual relocation to their current home 1,000 feet above the desert floor in Mesa, Arizona, turned her attention toward the Grand Canyon, which she first visited and painted in 2005.

Then came that fateful thunderhead, which led Gooch to reimagine her palette. “Everybody wants to go with white when they’re painting clouds,” she says. “But there are all sorts of different tones and colors you have to use to build big, fat clouds and add a glow to them.”

Song of my Soul | Oil on Linen | 26 x 26 inches | 2024

Ever the teacher, during the 2020 pandemic Gooch began sharing her expertise online. Several hundred students now follow her warm-spirited, well-detailed lessons, which include such unconventional techniques as modeling oil paints with her fingertips and the sides of her hands — not to mention such subtleties as adding touches of lighter paint to suggest sunshine breaking through. “That,” she says, “is the sparkle.”

Gooch’s work is represented by Broadmoor Galleries in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Sorrel Sky Gallery in Durango, Colorado; Mountain Trails Galleries in Sedona, Arizona; and by appointment at Gooch Studio in Mesa, Arizona. She’ll be participating in the 20th annual Cowgirl Up! Exhibition and Sale at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, Arizona, March 28 to May 25; and the Roundup Exhibition and Sale at The Museum of Western Art in Kerrville, Texas, April 25 to June 7.

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.