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Photo Reva Blau
Donald Beal will show a selection of his new work at Harmon Gallery in Wellfleet beginning with a reception on Saturday. |
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“Leaning Tree” by Donald Beal. |
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The positive of negative space
By Reva Blau
Banner Correspondent
If you think about landscapes, you think of the negative space around them: the sea, fields or mountains from a comforting distance, the sky a neat divider. Landscapes often feature the mediating, pedagogic hand of civilization whether it is the mowed grass or the principle of the horizon line that governs the way humans have taught themselves to look.
You begin to realize that few painters take the open air out of plein air painting to paint the true unruliness of the outdoors. Few painters bushwhack through the trees.
Quietly and carefully, as befits the genre, painter Donald Beal, who has an opening at the Harmon Gallery in Wellfleet Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m., has been transforming the relationship of painter and natural landscape since he was a student. In his landscapes, he has managed to push the boundaries of figurative painting by making his emotive and visceral response to visual elements as much a part of the work as the subject.
Beal has earned the highest respect for his paintings, many of which feature Beech Forest and the local landscape as their primary subject but end up saying so much about the way one privately sees. Still in his 40s, Beal has had a solo show at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, shows frequently at various galleries in New York and, in addition to being a professor of painting at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, teaches at the Museum School at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (where he also curates major exhibitions of his peers and predecessors).
None of these accolades goes to the painter's head. Beal is self-effacing to an almost ridiculous degree. Rather than his impressive resume, Beal talks about painting exclusively in terms of labor and engagement.
In late August, he escapes the bugs and the people on the Cape to head farther north to rent a house in Maine (where he traces ancestral roots) with his wife, photographer Khristine Hopkins.
"What I am looking at right now looks like it could paint itself," he says of the view. "But I can't do a damn thing with it." Rather than just being modest, he is saying something about the way he works.
Beal and I launch into a discussion about painters who travel in order to find inspiration. Beal works in the opposite way: Beal limns his own surroundings repeatedly waiting for their secrets to become unlocked.
When he first moved to the Cape, he painted the light of Provincetown and the water. He became dissatisfied with what seemed to him to be the received idea of the landscape. "It took me years before I could do a painting that was remotely, or even partly, my own," he said.
Beal left behind the open air above Provincetown to face the entanglement of earth and trees, the carapace of moss and underbrush that exists deep in the forest.
In Beech Forest, he found an inexhaustible supply of challenges that have occupied him ever since. The usual visual aids that painters use are gone when you walk into the forest, which uniquely bombards the viewer with visual material that changes through the seasons and with the life that lives in it.
When he is not painting directly from Beech Forest, he is “drawing,” as he puts it, “from the visual vocabulary” that its training gives him. The results are paintings that speak so intimately about one’s immediate surroundings they seem to spring out of the viewers' own private memories.
In "Family Outing," a woman in a bathing suit stands next to a body of water, a folding table with some objects standing next to her and children in bathing suits, sitting on the ground with only their profiles showing.
The woman's shoulders are imperceptibly curved towards the plane of the canvas suggesting a very slight feeling of self-consciousness, as she stares straight at the viewer. Despite this strong tension between subject and viewer, the viewer is incidental, just as the conscious brain seems irrelevant to a rush of memory. She wears a one-piece bathing suit offering the magnetic pull of negative space. The torso seems slightly too large for her legs, hinting at the classical relationships of geometric form that make these monumental paintings so satisfying.
The wall of trees across the pond seems also to abide by mathematical laws of proportion. It begs the question: is the scene perfect because nature made it that way or because Beal painted it that way?
Beal is both very determined and very spontaneous in his approach. "My paintings," he said, "even the ones that are very representational, are the result of trying to respond to marks and not really trying to impose a subject or an idea onto the canvas. It's a series of responses and accidents and bumbling around until something begins to evolve. I don’t seem to be able to direct a painting with a specific goal. It seems to direct itself and I aspire to listen to it.”
Beal studied at the Parsons School of Design where he received an MFA in painting. While in New York, he lived in Brooklyn in the same neighborhood as three other painters, Rob Dutoit, Thaddeus Radell and David Paulson, all of whom at various points studied with Paul Resika and Leland Bell. Dutoit now lives and paints in Truro, with his wife, artist Janice Redman.
The four painters hung out around a former teddy bear factory, converted into raw work spaces where three of them lived. Beal lived half a block away, thus defining their own artist ghetto shared with a few other artists willing to live broke to support their painting careers. An upcoming show at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis will feature these four artists, highlighting their friendship and their shared commitment to figurative painting, both of which endured through the vagaries of the art world and their geographical moves away from Brooklyn. Resika, who taught them in the early ’80s, still calls them “the nephews.”
The Harmon Gallery will show Beal’s work of the last six years, which incorporates both the larger format studio work as well as the much smaller paintings he completes in the woods.
In both ways of working, the sculptural nature of the Beech Forest landscape is present. The tree trunk casts angular shadows over the forest floor. Roots twist down into a neon green ravine. The branches dissolve and loose brush strokes signify a rustling of birds' wings or the unlikely blooming of an exotic flower in winter. Up close, the paint blurs into a private experience as roiling and immediate as one’s own memories of walking through the forest as a child.
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Voices of dissent
Outer Cape Gallery Listings
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Sep 6th, 2007