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Donald Beal’s Search for Beauty and Dynamism

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Donald Beal, Memory landscapes

NORTH ADAMS — While many painters strike rich with inspiration, and embark on a journey to fulfill expectation and ambition, Donald Beal prefers to approach his artistic process like a miner, armed only with the flashlight of his senses, searching for possibilities.

Using observations of nature as a launch pad, Beal creates paintings that reflect not only his journey as a human, but the senses that he gathers from his observations.

Beal’s paintings are part of an exhibit currently showing at Kolok Gallery on Union St. that celebrates the use of light as a vehicle for expression. “Place For Color,” which runs until Oct. 11, features Beal’s work alongside Cathleen Daley’s. The two painters complement each other effectively; both artists rely heavily on the nature of color to give life to their unique expression.

Nature and self

Donald Beal’s work breaks new ground in a gentle but inviting manner; his use of color and light are only devices designed to accent his unique sense of observation. What sets Beal’s expression apart from those of his formers, however, is the lens from which he gazes. His perspective of nature is, in a sobering yet enlightening style, reflective of himself.

“I’m more interested in coming up with a voice that communicates something felt,” said Beal. “Rather than (highlighting the beauty of a location), I’d rather add something that makes the viewer or myself feel something. In some way, it translates experience; it somehow gives voice to experience.”

Creating small paintings directly from his observation in the woods of Beech Forest, near his home in Provincetown, Beal values place as a catalyst for receiving inspiration. His paintings, however, are not necessarily specific to the locale in which they were painted. His portrayal of nature, seen through his observations of his own senses, combine the human element with nature; thick woods, accented by branches, changing leaves, and blue sky visible through the spaces, communicate the fact that observation is subjective. Beal says the physical subjects he paints are only the starting points for the instinctive traces of emotion and echoes of memories that come across in his paintings.

“I’m not trying to literally make the things in front of me,” said Beal. “It’s really a frantic, intuitive conversation, a contemplation of what’s out in front of me, what it’s like to be there at that moment.”

Beal uses colors that are not usually associated with nature, such as pink, teal, and neon green, highlighting the flow of senses that he taps into for inspiration. Often, dashes of color appear in unpredictable places, allowing nature to step out of its own boundaries. Beal also uses shadows effectively, which, when combined with the predominate theme of autumn in his paintings, indicate the notion of transition.

In addition to the small paintings, Beal also paints larger pieces with what he calls “free-form improvisation,” which allows the painting to take a direction of its own. Beal believes that the results of the spontaneous process is unpredictable.

“One of the big paintings started off as a figure, and I turned it upside down and it eventually found its way into being landscape,” said Beal. “I wasn’t trying to make a landscape; I certainly wasn’t trying to make a red tree. These are some of the things that just happen in the course of the painting.”

Although the larger pieces each seem to have a definite theme and will send viewers on an intellectual hunt to gather the message, Beal says that he is not setting out to articulate a certain significance. The practice of beginning a painting with an existing vision and then attempting to realize it is a method that Beal has learned not to employ — his process of creation differs in that it is a reaction to the range of senses he experiences while painting.

“I really try to come to the painting without an agenda,” said Beal. “I just don’t seem to be that kind of painter that can consciously make an angry, or violent, or happy painting. My paintings just become whatever it is that they become, through an intuitive process.”

The message of Beal’s work seems to be the message itself. His paintings do, in a sense, invoke the question of mystery and secrecy in nature, but only use those questions as a footnote for the greater picture. Instead of creating an outline of the physical objects in front of him, Beal records the imprint of life reflecting back at him. If art is not only a reflection of a reality seen by the artist, but a glimpse into the perspective of the artist, then Beal’s series of nature-inspired paintings provide an intimate view of his personal structure of seeing.

By Ben Runnels, Special to The Transcript
Thursday, September 21, 2006

(A slightly different version of this essay appeared in Provincetown Arts in 2001.)

When the lushness of summer drains from the Provincetown Beech Forest, a particular truth or beauty that was waiting there all along is revealed. For Donald Beal, winter is the time of year that affords uncluttered time to engage with a landscape free from people and insects, and it offers startling revelations of formal structures and relationships that are usually hidden in the leaves. He remarks, “the light there in the winter is so peculiar, so specific to that place. There’s this dead, silvery color, ghost branches standing out against screaming green moss. It’s utterly unexpected, and always difficult to understand. It’s shocking and inexhaustible—there’s no easy way to comprehend it and that’s why I keep going back to it.”

It was after several years of living in Provincetown and painting its immediately appealing vistas of limitless sand, sea and sky that Beal looked for a different kind of landscape. The Beech Forest landscape is so much less sublime, much less easy to generalize: it shifts with every footstep and changes with the seasons. It was without an obvious horizon, focal point or delineation between fore-, middle and background, and Beal found it endlessly challenging, demanding its own complex visual language.

His recent Beech Forest paintings are charged with temporality, offering tangential, fragmented visions rather than universal pronouncements on a nature that stands apart from lived time. Many grapple with frozen, violent relationships between fallen and leaning trunks, some represent formless sand banks in paintings’ empty centers, others negotiate abstract negative gaps in lattices of branches and sky. The result is a representation of the ever-shifting, transcendent experience that moving through this intimately known landscape conveys, a squinting of the inner eye, a re-framing or decentering of the picture-worthy in the land. Having located a specific, ocular language in this place, Beal brought these formal problems back to his studio, as did all 19^th-century landscape painters. Reinterpreting Emile Zola’s definition of Realism as ‘nature seen through a temperament,’ Beal’s landscapes are truly contemporary, subjective responses to nature.

The tendency to paint individualistic, almost sentient, trees in the Romantic landscape tradition was described by Ruskin as the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ by which such inanimate subjects are attributed human qualities and onto which our emotions are projected. One of Beal’s largest recent paintings features a mad red tree trunk that thrusts through the center of the vertical image, splitting the distance in two. It emerged on the canvas, Beal says, “from an attempt to register a figure, or maybe from nothing at all, but then there was a red tree going up through the center of the painting and it reminded me of Rembrandt and Soutine’s animal carcasses, of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas: these paintings rattle around in my head a lot—but I’m not sure there’s any kind of narrative there.” Visceral and truncated, yet immobile, the tree has a weighty corporeality that does seem to encourage these formal analogies. Beal’s encrusted, painterly surfaces also invite inevitable comparisons to Courbet and Cezanne, who also localized their landscape practices in a well-known landscape. But even though the Beech Forest paintings evoke some elements of traditional landscapes, they are simultaneously the product of a contemporary painter well-versed in modernist abstraction.

Beal has recently introduced the occasional dog, horse or figure into the Beech Forest paintings; they occasionally dart between the trees, like shades of Pisanello. He explains their emergence as a way of ‘upping the ante,’ of finding a way to complicate the description of place or subjective vision inherent to the genre while maintaining a strangely non-narrative presence, neither nostalgic nor polemic. After periods of sustained looking and painting in the Beech Forest for a few winters, Beal occasionally returns to the shore with a changed vision, one that makes him ask very different questions, painting the Atlantic as turbulent, turgid, whipped-up and bruised: anything but the vacationer’s paradise.

(A slightly different version of this essay appeared in Provincetown Arts in 2001.)

 

Maura Coughlin received her PhD in art history from New York University.

She lives part-time on Cape Cod and teaches art history at the Massachusetts College of Art

and Tufts University.

Beal’s selected works fire the imagination
Don Wilkinson,
South Coast Today/The Standard Times
November 8, 2013
southcoasttoday.com/story/entertainment/local/2013/11/09/review-beal-s-selected-works/41949383007/

I have been fond of the paintings of Donald Beal for more than three decades, when we both attended the Swain School of Design in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

In those 30-plus years, Beal’s work has continually progressed from the sometimes clumsy and tentative visual theatrics of an undergraduate student painter, through the more carefully attuned explorations of a grad student at Brooklyn College and at the Parson New School of Design in New York City (from which he received his MFA in 1983), and onto the tight and aesthetically sophisticated work of an accomplished, mature artist, who has displayed everywhere from St. Louis to Beijing. He currently exhibits at Crowell’s Fine Art Gallery.

But even with my long association and familiarity with Beal’s work, his newest exhibition, simply titled “Donald Beal: Selected Works” was a revelation to me. The painting called “Invented Landscape” features a grouping of barren birch trunks in an off-center foreground. Far in the background, clouds of gray and lavender cap a sliver of denim blue sea and a rising pale green hill. Within the visual embrace of tree’s empty branches, far in the distance, a tiny lone figure, dressed in a fleck of brilliant red, stands with a small brown-and-white dog, a broken reflection in a nearby puddle or stream.

In “Mythological Landscape,” two great chunky diagonal bands of color — again, barren tree trunks — break the horizontal picture plane. A small fire blazes on the right, the sky intrudes from the top, water seeps in from the left, and the earth holds its own, defiantly. Purposeful invocation or not, with his choice of title and the loaded symbolism of the painting’s elements, Beal suggests the mystical elements of alchemy: fire, air, water and earth.

“Addison Maine (Remembered)” is a powerful work and the one that greets the viewer as one enters the gallery. A majestically cloud-populated sky of teal, tainted whites, purples and graying blues hovers over a landscape of gestures, suggesting but not overly articulating structures, roads and elements of the landscape. It features a seemingly favorite subject of Beal’s: the transition line between land and sea, where the imagination is set free and metaphor runs deep.

Beal uses not only brushes in the application of paint to his surfaces, but also the palette knife, which allows for a kind of mark-making that breaks the surface tension and creates strokes that “feel” different. Beal notes also using “rags, fingers, and hands” as painting tools. I have no doubt that he would utilize a torn strip of cardboard, a Popsicle stick or a monkey wrench as well, if it proved to make interesting marks.

In “Standing Woman (Daydreaming),” a female figure, perhaps a waitress or a cook, wearing a gray apron tied at her waist, stands in front of a table. She is ambiguous, almost featureless. She is framed in a field of blue, balanced by a red orb (tomato? apple?) on one side and a vibrant green glass vase on the other. In her hand dangles a yellow cloth and a paring knife. Is she daydreaming or is Beal?

Then, an epiphany: I began to note a theme in many of the titles: daydreaming, mythological, remembered, invented “¦

Was he not working at the easel in the field or the kitchen? Was he not working from observation? Was this all imagination? The work seems so “¦ real. And then, I read his artist statement in which he confirms my suspicions. His work is (primarily) an invention of memory, of myth, of a history of looking, and it is beautiful. They are figments and pigments of the imagination.

Donald Beal: New Paintings

by Maureen Mullarkey

artcritical.com/2003/01/01/donald-beal-new-paintings

Donald Beal’s instinct for color is deeply appealing. And instinct it is. Color sense cannot be forced. It has to come of itself, rather as memories do, by natural association and unbidden, long after striving for it has ceased.

For the majority of contemporary painters, color precedes form. It is from color that forms are made. Painters committed to maintaining identifiable reference, however loose, to the world as it appears, must grant color a structural role. The finest of Beal’s work here maintains a subtle, lyrical balance between the constructive and expressive uses of color.

On show – Beal’s first at Prince Street- are a series of large explorations of the Provincetown Beech Forest. Played fortissimo, they are generous orchestrations of natural scenes that use color for its lyrical properties without losing touch with reality. Maura Coughlin’s comment in the exhibition brochure gets it just right in specifying the advantage of the subject to Beal’s coloristic approach:

The Beech Forest landscape is so much less sublime, much less easy to generalize: it shifts every footstep and changes with the seasons. It was without an obvious horizon, focal point or delineation between fore-, middle- and background, and Beal found it endlessly challenging, demanding its own complex visual language.

The language is simply that of color, seeded -in the most convincing works- with hard facts. It is for good reason that Woods, Dog and Rabbit was chosen for the announcement. Together with Dogwalker (Red Tree), this is Beal’s work at its most distinctive in terms of color and compositional discretion. Each of these uses the strong verticals provided by trees to stabilize the dappled disorder of sunlight and shade on woodland underbrush. In each, a spotted dog serves as a useful natural form for providing a needed neutralizing of high-keyed color rhymes.

Swamp and the over-sized [102 inches square, hung on the diagonal] Ladyslippers are lovely to look at. But color sensation is not the whole of painting. For me these are weakened by having surrendered too much to abstraction. In each of them, color spills across the surface, giving the effect of something vague waiting to be shaped. Pretty, painterly abstractions that abandon description have become commonplace. The differences between them, no matter the artist, are more rhetorical than visual. But Beal has an authentic gift for sustaining tension between a measured abstraction and visual truth. Why muffle the accomplishment?

The monumental Family Outing is quite different in feel and in influence. While the landscapes follow the chromatic lead of earlier colorists, this image of a standing woman seems more consciously contemporary. David Parks and Richard Diebenkorn are not far in the distance. It is an impressive painting if a bit unsettling. Color is more somber here, the rhyming gone. Its gritty modernity lends it a frisson that the subject itself might not suggest.

Donald Beal: New Paintings
by Maureen Mullarkey
Prince Street Gallery
530 West 25th Street, New York NY 10001
January 7 through 25, 2003