The English painter Su Goddard's family came from Norfolk , a place associated in the early nineteenth century with the “ Norwich School ,” whose most important representative was the watercolorist John Sell Cotman. Goddard is also distantly related by marriage to J.M.W. Turner, another great British artist who, along with his celebrated oils, also produced remarkable watercolors. So she certainly has auspicious origins to complement her medium of choice. And that she grew up in a home with a spacious English garden, where she felt close to nature, could also locate Goddard firmly within the British landscape tradition.
  However, Goddard has also been strongly influenced by Japanese and Chinese art, as well as the work of the American abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, and all of these inspirations combine to splendid effect in her aquarelles, on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street , from June 1 through 21. (Reception: Thursday, June 7, from 6 to 8 PM.)
 Her Asian influences, however, are hardly self-consciously “multicultural” in the manner of many artists today. Quite the contrary, unlike traditional Chinese scroll painters and Japanese literati artists, who work mainly in monochromes created with diluted black ink, Goddard employs a full spectrum of luminous hues. Nor is her work linear in the manner of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, who practice a Westernized form of Asian brush painting. Rather, Goddard's
compositions consist of areas of color that flow freely over sheets of watercolor in a full-bodied manner that is more firmly grounded in the traditions of European abstraction. What she takes from Asian art is more spiritual than material --which is to say, the privileging of essences over appearances as an abiding aesthetic ethos.
 Thus while one might read pastoral references relating to the affinity for nature she developed as a child at play in her parents' English garden into a watercolor such as Goddard's”Citronella,” with its vibrant yellow, green, and blue washes (and these might be to some degree accurate, since the title refers to an Asian fruit tree that is often imported and replanted in Europe), Goddard makes no attempt to imitate botanical particulars. She is concerned solely with the overall rhythms of nature rather than its details.
 And while another composition, “Nimbi,” could allude, as its title suggests, to the cloudy radiance said to surround a saint when on earth, it could just as easily evoke an impression of frothy surf crashing against rocks or any number of other things.
  One gets the feeling that, like many of our best abstract painters, Goddard intends her titles more as a handy means of distinguishing one composition from another, rather than as a way of imposing predetermined meanings on them that might inhibit imaginative interpretation on the part of the viewer. Thus, when she titles another watercolor in which flowing areas of visceral red hues predominate “Her Passion,” one gets the feeling that she could just as plausibly be referring to her passion for painting as to a romantic interlude. Yet that no possible interpretation can be ruled out completely seems auspiciously in keeping with Su Goddard's lively and liberating aesthetic agenda.