A Southern Howl: Thoughts on Miles Cleveland Goodwin 

The great Mississippi writer, Barry Hannah, famously said, “The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.” The paintings of Miles Cleveland Goodwin do just that – they howl. Goodwin’s paintings cut through the noise of our contemporary sensibilities, laying bare the human condition through his own brutally honest depiction of his little corner of the world. As a contemporary painter and sculptor based firmly in the rural South, Miles Cleveland Goodwin draws inspiration from his own dark, rich and fertile imagination and from the landscape – including the flora, fauna and folks who reside there. His complicated and intuitive narrative paintings are executed in a rough expressionism, often exploring concepts of mortality, struggle, place and cultural identity. At its core, his practice is that of a visual storyteller. The stories Goodwin weaves through his paintings resonate with the Southern Gothic literary tradition – stories of family, religion, race, community, morality, and the land. They are tales of a place steeped in tradition, filled with natural beauty and haunted by the past – a past of lost empire, of lost causes, of old cruelties. Painting both the real world around him and the startling world of his dreams, his surfaces are saturated with a deep sense of place and the burden of history. 

His works range from brutal dirty realism to figurative flights of fantasy, but they are all deeply Southern, because Goodwin is deeply Southern. Born in the Biloxi, Mississippi in 1980, he served a tour of duty in the US Navy before earning a BFA from Pacific Northwest College in Portland, Oregon in 2007. After returning briefly to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Goodwin established a studio in rural Northern Georgia, on the eastern ridge of the Appalachian Mountains. Goodwin currently lives with his dog, Venus, in a small wood frame house deep in the countryside of Fannin County, Georgia. Fannin County is a mountain community that is 99% white with over 90% of residents living on unincorporated lands. The county seat is Blue Ridge, with a population just over 1,200. Per capita income hovers just above the Federal Poverty Level. Once an agricultural community, the county has little economic opportunity for the average resident now. But what it lacks in industry, it makes up for in natural beauty. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, it is home to the Chattahoochee National Forest, the Cohutta Wilderness Area, Lake Blue Ridge and a large section of the Appalachian Trail. This tension between rural poverty and rural beauty is a recurring theme in Goodwin’s work. 

Isolation and natural beauty have historically been very conducive to creativity. Just as Van Gogh eschewed the salons of Paris, escaping south to Arles to create, so too has Goodwin escaped to Blue Ridge, Georgia to stoke his creative fire. So severe was his isolation at one time that he took a job for one day a week at the local Home Depot solely for some human interaction. (A coworker at the Home Depot became the subject of The French Painter because of his resemblance to Gustave Courbet.) But in this place, Goodwin found his inspiration. Larry Brown, another giant of Southern Literature, once said in an interview, “You take what you’re given, whether it’s the cornfields of the Midwest or the coal mines of West Virginia, and you make your fiction out of it. It’s all you have. And somehow, wherever you are, it always seems to be enough.” The landscape of Northern Georgia certainly seems more than enough for Goodwin, as it has become his muse, and the folks and creatures that reside there have become the main characters in his visual epic. 

The visionary American painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder once stated, "The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance.” Living in the Appalachian Mountains amidst profligate natural beauty, Goodwin has no shortage of subject matter to paint. Resisting mannerist repetition and clichéd representations, he brings his own brooding sensibilities to portraying the landscape. Much like Ryder’s moody and poetic seascapes, the landscapes of Miles Cleveland Goodwin fill the viewer not only with a strong sense of place, but also with a deeply emotional response to the land. Take for example Wind from the Moon (2022), a small but powerful nocturne. When I asked Miles about his inspiration for the painting, he said, “Sometimes I just get real emotional about a landscape. Where does that emotion come from? So this painting is like that emotion pushing the trees, like wind from the moon.” Yet within that emotional response, there exists a darkness. The rough handling of the surface, the jagged edges, the violent wind and the ominous sky build a palpable tension. The landscape is beautiful, but unforgiving. Another powerhouse landscape is Hound Dog, depicting Venus on the Toccoa River. Avoiding a romanticized depiction of a lazy Southern river, this painting shows the river as a wild place, with Goodwin’s trusted companion on the precipice of deep and dangerous currents cutting through a shadowed thicket. The landscape is never just a landscape in Goodwin’s work, but allegory. Perhaps the strongest example of this can be found in the masterful A Day on Earth. In this painting, Goodwin depicts a man crossing a stream in a harsh winter landscape. The ground is frozen, trees are bare and the sky is troubled. Yet in the midst of this chilling scene, a white bull sits serenely in the snow. In this painting, Goodwin relates the brutality of life, illustrating the struggle that begins the day we each are born. Yet the white bull in this composition becomes a spiritual figure, an allegory for resistance and perseverance. A painting which at first glance might seem a simple rural landscape, upon further contemplation becomes an allegory for the human condition, with the common man as both victim and hero of the tale. 

That white bull lives not far from Goodwin in a neighbor’s yard, as do most of the animals in his paintings – the mules down the road, the dog at his feet. Each creature takes on symbolic meaning in the narratives Goodwin builds in his painting. And although he would rather each viewer bring their own understanding to his work, we can glean some of that meaning through careful consideration. Some animals recur regularly: the white bull, donkeys, deer, cows, dogs, the crow. While some are classic signifiers in art, such as the crow as trickster and messenger, others are deeply personal symbols for the artist, and those symbolic meanings may change across paintings. While the white bull may represent perseverance and resistance to the struggle of life in one painting (A Day on Earth), it may represent sacrifice and acceptance in another (Lucifer). While the deer may represent vitality in the midst of hardship in Crow and Deer, a young fawn seems to signify innocence, tenderness and creativity in How Stars are Made. The mules in Goodwin’s paintings recur regularly, and to great effect. These beasts of burden could easily represent the everyman, the common man, stand-ins for the people that populate this rural landscape – hard working, stubborn, fiercely independent and undervalued by polite society. 

It is those common folk of the rural South that take center stage in Goodwin’s paintings. Just like the animals in his paintings, the people in Goodwin’s narrative are all real. Some are friends and family, some acquaintances and neighbors. Some are strangers that captured his attention – perhaps for their vulnerability or their strength, for their kindness or their bigotry. Perhaps subjects are chosen for their pride despite their circumstance or their dignity while facing death. In one of his stories, Larry Brown once wrote, “What interested him was what their hearts contained: love, grief, meanness, longing, fear, hurt. Not the frailties that came from being poor, but rather those that came from being human.” I can’t think of a better way to describe Goodwin’s approach to his subjects. When laying bare the meanness in man’s heart or the brutality of rural poverty in paint (Crooked Fingers), Goodwin holds no punches. But he is never cruel in his depiction, never unfair. Goodwin brings that same empathy, honesty and unflinching vision to his depiction of mortality, finding beauty and dignity in the process of death (The Beautiful Dying Man). And when he encounters a kind soul that has been dealt a bad hand in life, like the unhoused lady who lives behind his local Walmart, he elevates their narrative on his canvases – a humanist action in paint, bringing them the dignity he believes they deserve (The Appalachian Gypsy). By exploring his subject’s humanity, he moves his images beyond mere physical appearance, as might be captured by a photographer, pushing the viewer into a psychological encounter with the subject of his attention. “The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette,” said Edvard Munch, “until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.” 

At times, rather often actually, Goodwin moves beyond the psychological in his canvases, and into the spiritual realm. Goodwin’s spiritual approach to his studio practice is strongly felt in his emotionally charged landscapes, and clearly read in his narrative figuration. But it is on full display when he moves into the realm of myth and fantasy. Whether exploring Biblical themes (Lucifer, Consequence of Man, or The Antichrist) or classic mythology (Orpheus and Friends), Goodwin’s wholly unique vision pushes the viewer to contemplate new ways of interpreting the old stories, and as a result, new ways of understanding our own beliefs. Even when dealing with current political issues like the war in Ukraine (A Belly Full), Goodwin approaches the subject with a spiritual reverence. Yet for this viewer, it is his painting of a crumbling church from down the road in Copper Hill, Tennessee that offers his most poignant statement of spirituality. Abandoned Church depicts the rotting ruins of a Christian church with vines overtaking the edges. This is a scene of both literal and metaphorical ruin – commenting upon the loss of spirituality within deeply religious people, illustrating the loss of hope within impoverished communities and hinting at broader societal challenges across the South. It is truly a spiritual howl, and it embodies the Southern Gothic. 

Miles Cleveland Goodwin is one of the most potent contemporary visual narrators of the Southern Gothic tradition. His practice has as much in common with writers such as Larry Brown, Toni Morrison, Harry Crews or Donna Tartt as it does with painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder, Elliot Daingerfield or James Ensor. With this recent body of work, we are invited to bear witness to one place fully understood by a native son. Through the power of Goodwin’s talent as a painter, his uncommon empathy as a human and his boundless imagination, he is painting a new mythology of the American South. And it howls. 

Bradley Sumrall

Curator of the Collection

Ogden Museum of Southern Art