Boston painter a monumental success

By Holly Chin
He has an extensive resume, and his paintings have appeared in popular sitcoms and movies. He has won more than a dozen awards and has just won another for his painting "Feet Don't Fail Me Now," created for the 1996 Summer Olympics. But perhaps one of his greatest projects is yet to come.

Paul Goodnight is designing a monument to remember the Middle Passage, the sea voyage African slaves had to go through on their way to America, in which millions of them perished. The Middle Passage Memorial project began in 1991 and has made much progress over the past six years. Although Goodnight is not sure when the monument will be completed, he had a model of the sculpture constructed as part of the project Mural Masters and Monuments, sponsored by the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury.

Goodnight hopes to have the monument erected on an island in Boston Harbor, but is unsure about which island. This site is appropriate because Boston played a major part in the slave trading triangle as a port where slaves were brought into the country.

Besides this design, Goodnight, whose paintings have appeared in televisions shows like "The Cosby Show" and films such as "Speed 2," is currently working on another unnamed painting and on a stained-glass window for the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He has just won the Sport Artist of the Year Award for "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" from the U.S. Sports Academy. "I was very calm and said, `Thank you very much.' And then when I hung up the phone I just yelled and I screamed and I jumped around, and I became a child again."

Goodnight, 51, was chosen to be one of 15 official Olympic artists. "Feet Don't Fail Me Now," which is now in the Olympic Museum in Switzerland, hung in an Olympic Gallery during the Atlanta games. He chose to paint runners because he finds track and field to be one of the most exciting and challenging of sports. "I like runners. I like the composition, and I just thought it would be a space where I would really enjoy painting a piece of artwork and paint what I really enjoyed doing years and years ago."

It never occurred to Goodnight that painting could be a career possibility for him when he was growing up, but after returning from the Vietnam War, he pursued it more seriously. He developed a speech impediment that lasted about seven months. He stuttered and could not speak clearly, and many thought he was crazy but he convinced himself that he was not.

"I realized I wasn't crazy, but it could have easily driven me that way. But I had this [painting] as an outlet which brought about some balance."

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