This work sits at an important juncture in Betty Goodwin’s career. It bears elements of both her Social Realist works and genre painting, and also pushes forward into her later more minimal, abstracted expressions. This provides an important vantage point from which to view Goodwin’s body of work as a whole: no matter how spare or conceptual her practice became, it was always grounded in our shared social world with a sympathy for our human struggles. Notable in this work as well, is her engagement with the oil paint. A hallmark of Goodwin’s practice is her work’s materiality, and her visceral relationship to the physicality and presence inherent within the media she was using, be it paint, conté, mylar, printing plates, clothing or steel.