Great Pond Gallery at the Wellfleet Adult Community Center
Donald Beal - Paintings
Part of a monthly changing exhibit showcasing local artists.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
My paintings are made from either direct observation or are studio inventions. Both ways of working are informed by years of looking at the art from the distant past to the work done by my contemporaries. The landscape is most of what I do when working from life. Painting from life forces me to be truly awake, and to look deeply at what I’m confronted with. It can be an overwhelming experience, and I find the only way forward is to trust my impulses and instincts to find some way to articulate a deeper understanding of what it means to be there. If all goes well the painting finds a form that expresses something that goes beyond expected and easy answers, and exposes deeper and more difficult truths. Working from life is both exhilarating and exhausting and is the most demanding work I’ve ever done. It’s the foundation everything else I do stands on.
The invented paintings made in my studio begin as open mark making and smears of color that attempt nothing more than to establish a spatial relationship with one another. As these relationships build, suggestions of imagery inevitably emerge. If these images feel vital I try to foster them, if not, they get knocked down until something new takes shape. Working this way I can build paintings that are found through an abstract language from which the unbeckoned and mythologized memories of figures, animals, landscapes, florals are created unforced, and unmannered.
Working this way I’m able to find something unexpected, and avoid the self conscious and literal responses that working from a fixed idea can lead to.
ARTIST’S BIO
Donald Beal was born in Syracuse, New York and grew up in Westford, Massachusetts. He studied painting at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and received an MFA from Parsons School of Designin 1983. He moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1985 and continues to live and work there with his wife Khristine. Beal taught as a Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts in North Dartmouth from 1999 until 2019. He was a 2013 recipient of the Lillian Orlowsky William Freed (LOWF) grant, and has received grants from the National Academy of Arts, the Gottlieb Foundation, and the Artists Fellowship. He has shown his work nationally in both group and solo exhibitions, and is included in numerous public and private collections.
Great Pond Gallery at the Wellfleet Adult Community Center, 715 Old Kings Highway
Month of December, M-F: 8 am - 4 pm - closed Christmas Day
Robert Rindler: Curator, James Connors: Co-Curator & Installation