It’s rare that I find work that reminds me of why I take joy in being alive. Provincetown based artist Donald Beal does that, and hopefully as the honoree artist at Provincetown Art Association and Museum Annual Gala, and a show at Berta Walker Gallery, he will gain more of the recognition that he deserves. About a dozen works to be determined will appear at PAAM and some 14 at Walker’s.
With delicious light and colors which leap off the canvas, his painting captures the grand chaos and entropy of humans and nature. It’s immediate, often dramatic — with humans, or dogs, dissolving into the body of the wild, joining the wild with tame; landscape is within beings, they are of it; it is of them. And conversely, constrained vases of flowers, or humans, stand out vividly against skewed backgrounds of wilder nature occasionally reminiscent of old masters.
Landscapes exist on their own, actively experiential — dream imposing its colors and shapes on the real — merging the two. All his paintings create beautiful pieces of heightened life. His drawings are both sensual and modest. They, like his paintings, often show humans, mostly nudes, dissolving into what surrounds them, becoming a part of it.
Beal grew up in a small rural town in Massachusetts near the New Hampshire border where he had the freedom to wander the woods with his dog. There was not just nature, but culture: his parents took him to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where, at age six or seven, he was floored that paintings existed, amazed that “miracles were hanging on the wall; I couldn’t believe they were real and that a human hand had made them.”