IF THE STATE of New Mexico is viewed as a torso, Lincoln County is its slightly east-of-center belly button. That core has a rich history. Centuries before New Mexico became a state in 1912, Lincoln County’s mountains, forests, and deserts were crossed by Mogollon, Piro, and Apache peoples. By the 1850s, Mexican families had set up communities along the area’s riverbanks. Lincoln County is now known for the 84-mile Billy the Kid National Scenic Byway, a much-visited stretch of US 70 where the brutal Lincoln County War took place in the late 19th century. Today, most of the drama in Lincoln County comes from its striking terrain.
Artist William A. Goodman lives in the southeastern corner of Lincoln County, in Tinnie. Roughly equidistant between Ruidoso to the west and Roswell to the east, Tinnie nestles in the pleasantly green Hondo Valley, near the intersection of US 70 and 380. Although Tinnie is tiny and remote, this part of Lincoln County is not entirely foreign to artists. To the west in San Patricio, painters Peter Hurd (1904–1984) and Henriette Wyeth (1907–1997) settled and raised a family. Even closer, in Hondo, lived sculptor Luis Jimenez (1940–2006), whose studio Goodman visited weekly for a Tuesday lunch date that lasted until Jimenez’s death.
The artist’s Gordian sculpture, in Tinnie.
In Tinnie, a smattering of buildings—Goodman’s 1880s-era home, a long-shuttered motel, and a former gas station and auto garage—comprise the artist’s property. Interspersed throughout the cacti-specked spread are a dozen or so of Goodman’s abstract steel sculptures, many more than 10 feet tall. On a late summer visit to Goodman’s compound, I park near the monumental Starling, whose ropy steel tendrils overlap to converge in a beaklike point. Up close, its thousands of tiny welds look like seams of a metallic patchwork quilt. I’ve come here to meet Goodman, an artist known for throwing himself into demanding disciplines—whether welding steel, stabilizing 20-foot-tall sculptures, troubleshooting analog arcade games, or painting outsize murals—with rigor and enthusiasm.
Lincoln County, with its terrain filled with dramatic starts and stops—and a past laden with outlaws—deserves an artist like Goodman, who does not sell his work through a gallery and does not have an agent. “When people want to buy something,” he says, “they usually just visit me.”
He turned 87 in October, continuing to make art proudly to the beat of his own drum, powered by seemingly bottomless energy reserves. Often called eccentric, Goodman is something of an elder statesman around these parts. As one of the first graduates of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence (RAiR) program in the late 1960s, he liked the area so much he stuck around. “William is always working and always has a project,” says Larry Bob Phillips, director of RAiR, who likes taking new resident artists to Goodman’s studio. “He doesn’t need external factors to drive his creativity.”
William A. Goodman with one of his pinball machines.
GOODMAN IS COMPACT AND QUICK AND speaks with the effortless animation of someone whose mind is always alight with ideas. While growing up during World War II in the affluent London suburb of Wimbledon, he remembers seeing bombs land on his town’s famous tennis courts, but he does not recall experiencing fear. “It’s just the way it was back then,” Goodman says. “War was normal to me.”
At 18, Goodman volunteered for the Royal Navy to avoid being drafted for military combat. “I was picked on mercilessly in the navy because I did not come from the working class,” he says. But there was a rum ration, unlimited cigarettes, and visits to far-flung locales like Oman and Sri Lanka. In 1959, Goodman moved permanently to America by way of San Francisco, selling crabs on Fisherman’s Wharf before he eventually wandered into the city’s California School of Fine Arts. He ended up falling in love with creative practices, leaving with degrees in both painting and sculpture. “I hadn’t planned on becoming an artist,” he says, “but my commitment to art was similar to my commitment to the navy. I didn’t look back.”
"Untitled," lithograph on paper.
Courtesy of the Roswell Museum.
He arrived in Albuquerque in the late 1960s, initially for an art teaching position at the University of New Mexico, where he worked for several years before deciding a professor’s life wasn’t for him. When a friend told him about the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program, Goodman applied.
RAiR, now in its 57th year, was the brainchild of Don Anderson, an oilman and passionate self-taught artist. It led to such a prolific artistic output that the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in 1994 to store and display alumni artwork. “When I first met Mr. Anderson, he bought a couple of sculptures from me,” Goodman recalls of his early patron. “Then he commissioned three more. It was a great boost.”
As its director, Phillips likens the experience of the residency to “the rarest gift of all, which is time,” he says. “The program has no strings attached. There are no expectations and no distractions.” Phillips, an accomplished muralist, applied for his own spot in RAiR’s program several times before he was accepted in 2009. In Roswell, he met Goodman and immediately recognized him as “an artist in the truest sense of the word.”
"Oddy Knocky" is a favorite of school groups and other Roswell Museum visitors.
Gift of Donald B. Anderson and Sally M. Anderson. Courtesy of the Roswell Museum.
Tinnie is the perfect place for such a person: It’s remote without feeling desolate, soaked in a rugged history that Goodman respects and preserves in his studio. Twenty-five years after he moved into the former auto garage and parts shop, dust-covered inventory in its original packaging still fills the space, much of it neatly hanging on rusted display racks.
The old motel on Goodman’s property is on the rim of Tinnie Canyon, a perch that the artist tells me has been slowly eroding into the valley below for years. Thorny weeds and wispy grasses protrude from the pale earth. Animal bones adorn the uneven ground that leads up to the inn, which shuttered permanently many decades ago. Goodman has renovated three of its five narrow, cell-like rooms, where he stores personal items—a bedroll nudged close along a window, stacks of paperbacks—as well as works from his three-dimensional hanging Landmask series. The sculptures, whose molded-paper ridges and valleys are assembled atop wire armatures, contain rigidly angled areas and sometimes bubbling, bulbous forms which stop just short of resembling realistic environments.
The landform sculptures were inspired by Goodman’s time as a coal mine surveyor, a gig that took him away from New Mexico for four years in the 1970s. “I was trying to figure out how to get a bulldozer into a pit,” he explains. “The Landmasks were made to resolve it.” He lost the job before he could test their efficacy, but he continues to work on the series.
Goodman wakes just before midnight to jog several miles along NM 368, which runs through the center of his property. “It’s an uncommonly good place to run at night. The road is dirt but it’s well-maintained,” he says. “Everything is illuminated by a misty kind of starlight.” Back home, he breakfasts around 2 a.m. on oatmeal measured out from a 50-pound bag, then goes back to sleep before spending the day at work in his studio. Dinner is often rice and beans, also purchased in bulk; the hours between dinner and sleep are filled with reading.
“I like people, that’s the truth,” Goodman says, explaining his solitary lifestyle. “But making things engages me completely.”
He does not employ an assistant. “He’s so focused and has so much experience,” Phillips says, “that almost anybody is in his way.” Goodman’s longtime friend Miranda Howe agrees. “William is alone a lot, but he definitely has a social life,” she says. “People stop by his studio in Tinnie a couple times a week.”
William A. Goodman displays one of his "Landmasks" at his home.
Howe, a 2012 RAiR participant, is also a part-time employee at the Anderson Museum, where Goodman’s featured works include Artesian, a high-shine galvanized steel sculpture near the museum entrance, and Cascabel, a crank-operated percussive instrument of Goodman’s own invention. “The musical instrument is a great way for people to get to know William because it’s so imaginative,” Howe says. “People don’t walk into a museum expecting to be able to touch the art.”
Goodman calls Roswell, where he lived for many years before moving to Tinnie, “my home base.” He heads there to visit friends from RAiR and the Anderson and Roswell museums, both of which feature his monumental sculptures in outdoor spaces.
In 2021, the Roswell Museum mounted a retrospective for the artist that also served as an anniversary of Oddy Knocky, a 37-foot-long mural on canvas completed in 1971. Action-packed and wildly colorful, Oddy Knocky’s cast of characters includes a tugboat whose bow side looks an awful lot like a human face, a dragon playing a trumpet, a white cube sprouting twisty cables or veins, and a foot disappearing up the steps of a dark tower.
Goodman named the painting after a slang term invented by Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange. “Oddy Knocky means ‘to be on one’s own,’ ” Goodman says. “I was alone making this, often teetering on top of a ladder with a paintbrush.”
Roswell Museum’s executive director Caroline Brooks says that among the many paintings in the museum’s collection, Oddy Knocky is a favorite of school groups and other museum visitors. “We love Oddy Knocky because of its inventive characters, all parading through such fantastical worlds,” she says. “There’s so much movement that one can’t help but imagine a racket of sounds."
THIS SENSE OF MOVEMENT UNDERSCORES much of Goodman’s work, from his paintings and Landmasks to his towering, amorphous sculptures. Several of the latter are scattered across the state, including on the grounds of New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas and at the federal plaza in Las Cruces.
Lately, Goodman has been engrossed in creating pinball machines and is working on his sixth. A pinball game Goodman made in 2016, Kinetic Park, is covered with the same precisely patched-together welds used on his monumental sculptures, its Lilliputian valleys a faded green. The game is populated with magnetic obstacles like wide discs, cone hats, and red-and-yellow flagpoles, all of which can be moved.
When it’s time for me to go, Goodman says goodbye near a 12-foot kinetic sculpture named Zephir. Its gnarled, three-pronged top is designed to rotate in the wind. Suddenly, Goodman’s head cocks to one side, alert to its creaking sound. “That sounds terrible,” he says. He smiles as he studies the steel structure before us. “Luckily, it’s easy to change the bearings on this one.”
Iris Fitzpatrick visited Lincoln County for the first time in August, where she fell in love with its varied landscapes and engaging, kind people.
