ADI GOODRICH

I’ve been painting a lot since quarantine started. It’s a part of the creative output I’ve always done. I studied painting and drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and even somehow got my poor-kid butt into that school with a scholarship. Sometimes I share my paintings, but often it’s a thing to keep me sane, an art therapy of sorts. I become quite anxious when I can’t produce something. With Set Design, Photography, Filmmaking, it requires such a large crew, weeks or months of preparation, so many conversations and many, many hands.. with painting, it’s nice to be alone and to create something that is truly for myself and no one’s opinion is part of the conversation. 

During college I worked for an artist, creating his work, gluing tiny pieces of paper to paper and painting in backgrounds.  At that time, age 20, I found selling his work to collectors to be a bit of a dead end. Why would you sell something to die on someone’s wall? It’s why I got into set design.. design lives more broadly, crews build it, people light it, it exists in a room, huge and it’s used to tell some sort of story.

Years later, I realize it’s not the painting collectors bought, it was his voice, his thoughts, his way of putting his own life into something material. He was selling paintings to become immortal. Unlike the work I do in advertising, making paintings feels like the thing I can leave to the world. Advertising imagery feels cheap and I can smell the money every time I see an ad. But a painting feels timeless. 

The other night I went out for an “Internet Cruise”.  It’s a solo-date I take myself on sometimes.. It’s mostly me digging into deep archives of museums. I found myself on the Denver Art Museum’s website and I saw the image above. This image is from the exhibition: Women of Abstract Expressionism. 

I thought to myself: Painting, wearing my coveralls or apron, this is how I feel most like me. So, painting, my oldest friend, is leading me through these times and I feel more like me than I have in 10 years.

Clay Hickson is one of my favorite artists. I feel like we get stoked on so much of the same and so much of the opposite. For example, we both love interiors and architecture, but I don’t like sexy ladies. Clay is also a great friend of mine in LA and this article is super inspiring to read: 

New music video we made for Dirty Projectors! 

Directed by: Sean Pecknold

Production Design/ Set Design by: Adi Goodrich

Creative Studio: Sing-Sing 

That’s cool. I want to ask you one more thing. It’s a new year and people are talking about resolutions. I don’t want to ask about that, but I do want to ask if there’s anything you would like to challenge us to think about in the new year as we move forward with our work. Whenever we start, there’s an idea that we have to search for content first. What will we draw or write?

I have a feeling that it isn’t about researching or Googling stuff—for me, it’s about removing all of the ideas that are in the way of my thinking.

Geoff McFetridge-

“In retrospect, I was just making decisions. I wasn’t super thoughtful, but I had instincts. When you’re a small studio, you can only take on so much and that makes you more decisive. You’re forced into doing more pieces of the job so you learn more. It’s also important to note that my ambitions are antithetical to running a studio. People talk about having peak experience. I think what I’m always looking for is peak creativity. What’s the peak? When you’re inventing as you’re making—not just finessing. That’s what I want to do.....”

“I’d like to find somewhere to try out things, together, things to do with our hands or machines, in any way, not like boy scouts or even like craftsmen and not even like workers and still less like artists, but like men with arms, legs, hands, feet, hairs, sex, saliva, eyes and breath, and to do them, certainly not to possess things and to keep them for ourselves and not even to give them to others, but just feel what it’s like to do things by trying to do them, trying to find out whether everyone can do things, other things, with their hands or machines—or whatever—etcetera etcetera. Can it be tried?”

Every year, Sight Unseen asks a few designers to share their favorite design moments of the year. This year, Jill and Monica asked me to be apart of it this year and you can read it here! : 

Stripping existence down to the barest of ways is a cool way to think about things. Often, in my set design work I talk about using the most minimal of shapes and color to tell a story- what are the most essential elements needed in an image? How much do we actually need to put into a composition for it to make sense to the viewer? Too much is costly for sets built by hand, and it becomes a messy image for people to look at, too little in a picture becomes too abstract and the viewer can’t bite into what you’re trying to say. 

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve thought of things in a sort of stripped down way...really just thinking about existence and why things are how they are...  For the past few months Sean and I have been starting our mornings off my reading a portion of the book “Great Thinkers” from the School of Life. Here’s a bit from the Jean Paul Sartre section: 

A Sartrean way to look at things:

Some feet and a toilet for “Japan & Finland Bathroom Tour, 1978″. 

I worked on this campaign with Dropbox last month and I’m really happy to see it out in the world! The team wanted to make this campaign about collaboration so they paired me with the French Illustrator, Victor Moatti. It was one of the quickest turn arounds and I think that really does make the best work. No time to change things, second guess yourself or have too many opinions to water down the image. Thanks to 72andSunny for having me and trusting me to Photograph and Set Design this campaign!

My crew on this was pretty remarkable:

Agency: 72andSunny

Veronica Rios, Andy Lam, Eleni Peters

Production: Joy Asbury, Tommy Romersa

Photography & Set Design: Adi Goodrich

Photo Team: Gregory Brouillette, Chris Moore, Rasmus Jensen, Clay Rasmussen

Stylist: Shirley Kurata

Hair: Anna Lyles

Makeup: Heather Cvar

Set Build: Steven Valdez, Matt Nichols