Ken Beck: Rock 'n Tree

September 2 - 27 at Gallery NAGA

Veteran Boston painter Ken Beck opens Gallery NAGA’s thirty-second season of exhibitions with a large show unlike any of the previous twenty-five he’s mounted since the early 1980s: it features landscapes.

Beck has always been known first as a painter of objects, single iconic forms staring out at the viewer – duckbill hats, fire hydrants, fence posts. Many of these have had a portrait lurking within them; Beck encourages our tendency to anthropomorphize.  But they’re typically posed in abstract, painterly space, ripped from any real world context. 

In this exhibition, context is evident.  There are paintings of rocky cliffs, of trees in a thicket, of weatherworn rocks that look like feet.  Even the paintings of isolated forms, such as the mask-like section of birch bark entitled Mercury Mask, seem to acknowledge the sylvan settings from which they’re removed.

To the painter, this opening up to the landscape seems a natural development.  “There’s been a thrust in my work since the beginning to conflate the three big subject matters of representational painting – the portrait, the still life, the landscape,” he says.  “This has not been a planned process, however.  It’s an accumulation of predilections.”

For Beck, a painting succeeds best when it spans these categories.  “Some are more straightforwardly objects, or landscapes, or portraits,” he points out.  “The most evolved of the paintings are all of these at once.”  The cliff paintings are examples.  Filled to their edges with the flat features of a sheer stone wall, they present a dense single object.  But these outcroppings are also connected to their surrounding terrain.  This is a place.  And they twinkle with suggestions of human features, as you’d expect from their titles, Big Rocky Face I and II.

Beck traveled to China with a group of Boston-area artists in 2005, and his encounter with the Chinese landscape and with Chinese landscape painting had an immediate impact.  He returned to produce his first series of landscape paintings in decades, their tall thin forms echoing scrolls.  In 2007 he was awarded a residency by the Rocky Neck Art Colony and spent a month painting in a wooden studio on a Gloucester pier, one that for years was the work space of Milton Avery.

For Beck, these experiences have reconnected to his earliest days as a young painter.  “It really is where I began painting, in Danvers, a tidal wetland environment,” he explains.  “My first subjects were the seashore, the marshes, and the mud.”