Reviews

Donald Beal’s Search for Beauty and Dynamism Full article in PDF format.

Donald Beal, artist and Provincetown resident, has been exhibiting his paintings on the Cape for nearly thirty years. Beal resides in a charming house near the center of Provincetown, and his work reflects not only New England’s light, color, and landscape, but also his own unique, invented places. Anthony Fisher, a painter who has known the artist for thirty years, remembers, “I first saw his paintings as sincere explorations of visual problems.” Even today, Fisher states that there is no “artifice” or “embellishment” in Beal’s work.

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,”…

(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…

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…

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…