Jeffrey Beauchamp: Freefall at Seager Gray Gallery

JEFFREY BEAUCHAMP

FREEFALL

Front cover: Frida Be You & Me (detail) Works of art Š Jeffrey Beauchamp. All rights reserved.

Jeffrey Beauchamp: Freefall Exhibition dates: November 1 - December 7, 2014 Reception for the artist: Saturday, November 8, 6 to 8pm Gallery Talk with artist: Saturday, November 8, 5 pm essay by DeWitt Cheng published by Seager Gray Gallery All inquiries should be addressed to: Seager Gray Gallery 108 Throckmorton Avenue Mill Valley, California 94941 415-384-8288, art@seagergray.com www.seagergray.com

essay by

DeWitt Cheng

No Way to Finish These Deep Fried Wiffle Balls oil on canvas, 60 x 48, 2013

From the Renaissance to the middle of the nineteenth century, artists believed in the power of the visual image to comment on the world. Painters were taught to create skillful depictions of observable reality. With the modernist revolution of roughly 1860 to 1960, artists asserted their independence from what was characterized as the slavish imitation of reality; this revolt was in part a response to the advent of photography. With the postmodernist revolution— by this term I include Pop art, land art, minimalism, conceptualism, and socialrelations art—that began in 1960 and is now five decades old, the notion of the art object as personal expression came into question and under attack.

In today’s pluralistic, anything-goes ferment, no central organizing principle predominates; there is indeed no consensus about what art is or does, since the anti-art ideas of Duchamp and others, promulgated through academically oriented art schools, define current practice for many. With the rising popularity of what has been “crowd-sourced curating,” i.e., interactive art situations, described recently by Ellen Gamerman in The Wall Street Journal (“Everybody’s an Art Curator”), it appears that art museums, too, are stepping away from the idea of personal expression toward what might be seen by old-school lovers of aesthetic visual experience as audience-friendly, risk-free group play.

The title of Jeffrey Beauchamp’s painting exhibition, Freefall, could plausibly be misinterpreted as a commentary on this current atomization of culture, but for this Bay Area painter it represents the condition of art-making, and even, more broadly, living: there are no guarantees (or recipes or formulas); everyone is free-falling from birth toward (spoiler alert!) the ground. (If you don’t believe me, see Dino Buzzati’s story “The Falling Girl” or Max Beckmann’s painting, “The Falling Man.”) Beauchamp’s goal, he says, referring to the Buzz Lightyear character in the Toy Story movies, is “to fall with style.” Contemporary artists who believe that only the new is significant deny themselves both aesthetic pleasure and a broader perspective if they fail to see the great works of the past as imaginative flights that never end—that transport viewers, century after century. Beauchamp is a consummate painter who was cautioned many times in art school, the San Francisco Art Institute, with “the F word,” i.e., facility, a bugaboo of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but who, suitably ‘inoculated’ against art fashion, uses his skill in the service of an eclectic mind, restless imagination, trust in instinct—and playful sense of humor.

Beauchamp: “I go with the flow and follow my impulses and assess as I go. I try to bring both sides of my brain into play and get a good balance.”

All the Good Little Californias oil on canvas, 22 x 28, 2013

In 2012 I wrote in Art Ltd magazine: A skilled realist, he [Beauchamp] became dissatisfied some years ago … and loosened up his style with what he has described as “busting out” brushwork and a “caveman dance” process, of making gestures guided by intuition and improvisation, in the abstract expressionist style. His turbulent landscapes all but fly apart through sheer bravura, but somehow remain legible and coherent, due, no doubt, to his apprenticeship in realism in the late 1980s, when nothing could have seemed more demodé. It was a self-guided study, of course. Beauchamp ensconced himself in the school library, studying Turner, Monet and Lorrain, emerging only to explore northern California’s “amazing garden,” hiking and painting with a friend. His work thus derives from both tradition and nature, and oscillates between realism and abstraction, but in an odd way: the modes are not fused, as in Cézanne or the Bay Area Figurative painters, nor are they confined to separate bodies of work, as in Gerhard Richter (whose soft-focus realism Beauchamp explored for a period).

Rather, they are presented simultaneously in parallel, in the same paintings, as double images.

As we change focus from depth to flatness and back, the hazy, golden-hued landscapes dissolve into energetic calligraphy, and vice versa, with each aspect canceling and superseding the other, like the complementary but incompatible partners in optical illusions: duck and rabbit or goblet and profile. Despite their humorous, absurd, enigmatic titles (some bearing excruciating puns), Beauchamp’s small landscapes … reward serious, sustained looking.

Bridge Out, Race On

oil on canvas, 30 x 40, 2014

The dozen-plus paintings in Freefall reward slow looking, too, their opulent color and brushwork complemented here and there by the artist’s philosophic humor (exemplified in a series made several years ago of carved, painted books — perfect for bibliophiles and bibliophobes alike). All the Good Little Californias appears to be a traditional landscape in the grand, turbulent, Romantic style of Turner, though loosely set down in quick strokes, as if by Manet, but it’s a conceptual work as well, an imagined landscape synopsizing the state’s geographical features. Bridge Out, Race On and I Hear Voices in My Head and Only Just Realized They’re All Actually Mel Blanc (referring to the voice of many Warner Brothers cartoon characters) are similarly faithful to the Romantic landscape tradition—in its own way, commenting both on the natural subject and the ways in which culture presents it for vicarious consumption. Cocotron the Chocolate Robot depicts a massive oak tree, hyperreal in its high-contrast modeling and implied anthropomorphism, rooted, like the boulder-like group of trees in the background, amid rolling hills that are delineated with expressionist brushstrokes—a crashing surf of vivid color.

I Hear Voices In My Head and Only Just Realized They’re All Actually Mel Blanc oil on canvas, 60 x 72, 2014

Cocotron the Chocolate Robot oil on canvas, 60 x 72, 2014

Landscape When Her Bread Machine Went Awry oil on canvas, 26 x 32, 2014

Familiar Balance of the Hasty Glacier and Landscape When Her Bread Machine Went Awry add figures to the landscapes; in the former, a small girl playing with a hula hoop between art books on Degas and DeKooning, two consummate draftsmen whose styles are represented here by the realistically rendered girl and the fluid, calligraphic landscape’ in the latter, a small girl, her back toward us, approaches a pile of burning leaves taller than she is—a miniature volcano. Longest Truce Ever Credited To A Board Game and Proper & Common —Some of My Best Friends Are Nouns also play with traditional genres: the medieval city as depicted before artists mastered perspective, with its jumbles of masonry, and the bucolic forest scene, here contemplated by two inquisitive but hardly decorative crows.

Familiar Balance of the Hasty Glacier oil on canvas, 60 x 48, 2014

Proper & Common, Some of My Best Friends Are Nouns preliminary Sketch, 2014

Proper & Common, Some of My Best Friends Are Nouns oil on canvas, 60 x 72, 2014

Frida Be You & Me, (left and right panels) oil on canvas, 24 x 18, 2014

Frida Be You and Me riffs on the title of the 1972 feminist book encouraging kids to question restrictive gender role models, and may incidentally refer to Frida Kahlo, who challenged stereotypes in her semi-autobiographical work; in Beauchamp’s painting, a solemn-looking teenaged girl sits on the floor or ground, kneading her hands, enlarged because they are extended toward the viewer, with strings of red and white paint squeezed from between her fingers; it can be interpreted as premonitory or symbolic, like Renaissance depictions of baby Jesus playing with toy crosses and flails, or as a metaphor for artistic creation derived from profound feeling, in the Van Gogh/Munch/Pollock mold. Birth of the Audubon Venus is a nude figure study of stunning realism and sensuality, but also an allegorical figure in the nineteenth-century style: woman as force of nature - more self-confident and bold than Botticelli’s demure 15th century version.

Frida Be You & Me

oil on canvas, 60 x 48, 2012

The Birth of Audubon Venus oil on canvas, 60 x 46, 2014

The Birth of Venus,

Sandro Botticelli, 1486

The two Resolution de Fleur paintings depict the same model, wearing a floral-print dress, seated, and dramatically lit in a dark interior, the first loosely rendered, with the face actually ‘out of focus,’ and the second, more ‘finished’—a nice conflation of the styles of, say, John Singer Sargent and Gerhard Richter. Two more related paintings, these depicting traditional bedroom suites, Blue Four-Poster and Red Four-Poster, lack the stylistic playfulness of the other works, offering instead the plaisir promulgated by Matisse a century ago with his ideal of paintings that would be as restful as armchairs for tired businessmen, not the sordid contemporary delights of real beds with real stained sheets. Those who love painting’s traditional pleasures and also enjoy intellectual provocations in the contemporary mode will find much to peruse and consider in Beauchamp’s generous, lively, irreverent painted world.

Resolution de Fleur I oil on canvas, 36 x 24, 2014

Resolution de Fleur II

oil on canvas, 36 x 24, 2014

Blue Four Poster oil on canvas, 30 x 30, 2014

Red Four Poster

oil on canvas, 30 x 30, 2014

Longest Truce Ever Credited To A Board Game oil on canvas, 72 x 60, 2014

Frosted Sonoma

oil on canvas, 30 x 48, 2013

Loch Lomond

oil on canvas, 24 x 36, 2014

JEFFREY BEAUCHAMP

1964 Born, Montclair, New Jersey

EDUCATION 1987-89 BFA, San Francisco Art Institute, Honor Studio 18 1982-84 Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts

HONORS 2012 SECA Award Nominee 2011 Winner, Marin Magazine Cover Contest 2005 Honorable Mention, SVMA Biennial 2003 Artist’s Choice Award, First Plein Air Biennial, Napa

Valley Museum 2002 Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant 2000 Best Painting, Sonoma Arts Guild: “Erotica” 1993 SECA Award Nominee

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2014 Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA “Freefall” 2014 Madrone Art Bar, San Francisco, CA “New Myths For 2012 Old: Recent Heroines In Their Natural Element” 2012 Marin Jewelers Guild, San Rafael, CA “New Work” 2008 McLoughlin Galley, San Francisco, CA “She Misplaced

my Hurricane Blueprints”

Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA

“Immigration is the Sincerest Form of Flattery” 2006 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA

“Mountains, Shoes and the Laurel & Hardy Rule” 2004 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA

“How About Sub-Pastoral Expressionism?”

2002 Mill Valley Community Center “Recognition” 2001 Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR “Serenity Now!” 1998 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA

“Measureless To Man” 1995 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA “Telluria” 1993 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA

“Les Barricades Mysterieuses” 1991 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA “Introductions” 1990 Alligator Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1989 Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute

SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2014 Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA “A Sense of Place”

with Kristen Garneau, Kim Ford Kitz, Suzanne Onodera

and Carole Pierce 2012 Bolinas Gallery, Bolinas CA with Gerald Arrington,

Sylvia Gonzalez and Dana Hooper 2010 Madrone Art Bar, San Francisco, CA

“Bodies in Space(s)”

with Theophilus Brown and Linda Wallgren 2010 J.Cacciola Gallery, New York, NY “Go Figure” 2009 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Art of Play” 2009 Corey Helford Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“Multi-Plane Show”

2009 2007

2005 2005 2003

Bo Lee Gallery, Bath, England “4 x 4” Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA “Landscapes: Rural and Urban Realities” Sonoma Valley Museum of Art Biennial Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, “Wet Paint” Napa Valley Museum, Yountville, CA Plein Air Biennial

2002 Dominican University, San Rafael, CA “Art with a Heart”

Featured Artist 2002 Sausalito Women’s Club, Sausalito, CA

“Salon of Plein Air Paintings” 2002 College of Marin Art Gallery, Kentfield, CA

“California Landscapes” 2000 Sonoma Arts Guild, Sonoma, CA “Erotica” 2000 Marin Community Foundation, Larkspur, CA

“Conversations with the Landscape” 2000 Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

“Disintegration-Contemporary Landscapes” 1994 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA

“Historical References” 1993 Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, Monterey, CA

“Contemporary Realism” 1993 Edith Caldwell Gallery, San Francisco, CA

“Self-Portraits in Black & White” 1992 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA

“Why Painting” Curated by Bill Berkson 1992 San Francisco International Airport, CA 1991 Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA

“Sacred Landscape” 1991 Zen Center Hospice, San Francisco, CA

“Concerning Nature” 1990 William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA

“Images of the Land” 1989 Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1988 Berkeley Arts Commission, Berkeley, CA

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2012 Art, Ltd “Jeffrey Beauchamp at McLoughlin Gallery”

by DeWitt Cheng, May 2006 Southwest Art “Reality Check-Six Artists Stretch the

Boundaries” February 2004 Pacific Sun “Rising Suns-12 People to Watch on the

Art and Entertainment Scene” August 18-24 2004 Marin Independent Journal, April 26 2003 The Robb Report “Cars, Cigars & Stars” February 2000 The Oregonian “Beyond the Landscape” May 4 2000 Marin Independent Journal May 31 1992 Artweek “At the End of Art” May 21 1992 Art in America “Jeffrey Beauchamp at Susan Cummins”

by Bill Berkson, January