This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Following is a review by Maureen Mullarkey, published January 1, 2003, in www.artcritical, an online magazine of art and ideas.
Robert 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.
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Biography from Crowell's Fine Art:
| Donald Beal was born on January 2, 1959 in Syracuse, New York, and
lived in Westford, Massachusetts until graduating high school in
1977. He studied art at the Swain School of Design in New
Bedford, Massachusetts, where he earned his BFA in painting in 1981.
After moving to New York City to study at Brooklyn College, he later
received his MFA in 1983 from Parsons School of Design. In 1985,
he moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and married photographer
Khristine Hopkins. Their son Max was born in March of 1986.
Beal is a professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Massachusetts, North Dartmouth since 1999.
Donald Beal continues to live and paint in Provincetown, Massachusetts. |
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