A Whirlwind of a Project at LACMA : Art: L.A. artist Joe Goode’s ‘Tornado Triptych’ kicks off an experiment to allow creation of large-scale works in the gallery.

“I’m the guinea pig,” said artist Joe Goode, whose work opened the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new “Laboratory” series Thursday.

Designed by Howard N. Fox, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, the series is intended to allow artists to create works of unusual scope in the museum galleries.

To start the series, Goode spent the last two weeks in a rear room of the museum’s Anderson Building creating his “Tornado Triptych,” a series of three monumental 13-by-14-foot sumi ink paintings depicting the progression of a virulent tornado.

“They offered me this room and said I could do anything I wanted,” said Goode, a 55-year-old artist who has exhibited extensively in California and internationally since the ‘60s. “So I started thinking what I would do differently (from his regular studio work) and I decided that what I needed to do was to make it a challenge for everybody that was working on it.”

That challenge started with the materials. Goode had the museum commission the heralded Fuiji paper mill in Tokushima, Japan, to design a special oversized mold and to make huge sheets of uniquely textured Japanese washi paper made of kozo fibers--a process that required several trial-and-error attempts. (The wife and daughter of the mill’s owner are proud enough of their work to have traveled to Los Angeles for the exhibition’s opening.)

Then the museum’s curators worked with Goode on designing a support for the paper that would allow the artist to climb directly atop it while working. It could not be left upright like a normal canvas, or the Japanese sumi ink used by Goode would run and drip.

Goode was not content to stick to traditional application methods for the work, either. He used spray tanks, mops and even brooms to create the tornado’s stormy sprays and swirls. And the process didn’t stop there.

“The fun part was that these things kept working when I left for the day. You never knew how it would look after it dried. You don’t know what color, or what value the ink will have until you finish (the entire project),” said Goode, who allowed a minimum of eight to 10 hours of drying time between ink applications. “All of these are materials (the museum curators and I) have never worked with on this scale before.”

Goode, a native of Oklahoma, has previously done series of works depicting forest fires, waterfalls and other natural phenomena. He has spent the 1 1/2 years on a series of paintings and drawings of tornadoes, but vows that the mammoth LACMA project is the series’s grand finale. “Being able to do a tornado on this scale means that when a human figure gets close to the work, they feel like they could be in the midst of it,” said Goode, who will retain ownership of the work.

Curator Fox conceived the laboratory series with New York photographer Cindy Sherman in mind (a future “Laboratory” is planned featuring a huge diorama done by Sherman in digital photo techniques), but Maurice Tuchman, the museum’s senior curator of 20th-Century art, suggested that Los Angeles artist Goode open the series when Sherman’s schedule prevented her from doing the work this summer.

“It’s a really stirring, inaugural prototype,” Fox said of Goode’s triptych, noting that the “Laboratory” series will likely feature three exhibitions over the next year or year and a half. He would not comment on other possible participants besides Sherman.

“The laboratory itself is an experiment. It’s a pilot program,” said Fox, who conceived the project as a way for the museum to enter into collaborations with contemporary artists of international scope. But the program will not have a set schedule or set space for exhibitions, which “could take place, in theory, anywhere in the museum, and could even use aspects of the permanent collection.”

“What we want to do is invite artists to do something they wouldn’t be able to do in the studio and wouldn’t be likely to do through the gallery system because of considerations like money or the size of the work. With (Goode’s show), for instance, no gallery would do this--he needed the resourcefulness of the museum to produce (work on this scale).”