(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 19th-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.