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by Bob Waite
Robert Beck has come a long way since his first show at the Riverside Theatre during the ’90s. That show was promoted by a grueling process of looking up addresses in a phone book, putting together invitations that included a folder, resume, background information and an invitation. Each envelope was hand-addressed, and he mailed 100 of them. The show’s opening only drew a handful of people because the date was the same day as the Eagle/Giants game. He says, “Now, I sometimes check when I schedule.”
Now Robert can say, “I was just delighting to myself that I have everything I need. I've gotten to that point as an artist where I'm not held up by the things that would get in my way when I was first starting out. Because then I didn't have a studio. And now I have accumulated those trappings of my career that enabled me to just go from thing to thing to thing.”
This nationally known Bucks County artist who paints Bucks County, Maine and New York, left his corporate job and changed the whole direction of his life. He enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. “In the 90s, right? I was forty, forty-one or something like that. Yeah, that was delicious. Because I was older and I knew what I was going after. It was a sacrifice to go there. It wasn't my parents' sacrifice. It was my sacrifice to go there.”
Besides painting, Robert is also a writer. He writes a monthly column for Icon Magazine and a bi-monthly column for the West Side Rag in Manhattan. He says, “And because I like to write, I write things that I just never get published. I write a lot of letters. I'm a letter writer.”
Robert, like the name of his upcoming show at the Morpeth Contemporary gallery, lives in the here and now. He admits, “I am not always sure of what day of the week it is.” Explaining what Robert views as an almost perfect life for someone who loves to paint and write, he says, “I'm writing with my cup of coffee and I'm writing with my drink at night. And I'm painting in the middle. I'm the painter in the middle.”
Robert feels a sense of immediacy in his life. He says, “The party doesn’t go on forever.” At age 74, not in a frantic sense, he realizes that what he does now “has to count.” There is a kind of earnestness in his art.
Classification according to various schools of art can elude even the most erudite viewer of Robert’s art. He is a representational painter, but not a Pennsylvania Impressionist. “Some people think Impressionist is the manner of the brush stroke. There are these globby strokes. When you get back, they come together. Impressionism is when an artist is trying to capture that moment of recognition or a moment of encounter. In that respect, yes, I'm after the encounter. I'm after that thing that made me stop and look and say, ‘Hey, look at that.’ If I'm categorized, most people would place me in an era of art that's called the Ashcan School.”
The Ashcan School, which began in New York with artists that started to use ordinary people and places as subjects. Robert says, “As typical, the critics stuck their nose up. One of them referred to the paintings as the ‘Ashcan School’ because they would have the tenements. Out back of the tenements were the trash cans that had the ashes in them.”
Placing this particular school of art in America’s big picture, he says, “You would equate that in American history with jazz, being an American art form. An American art form, a coming of age for not just the arts, but it's what America is coming of age and contributing as well.”
Further explaining his connection to the Ashcan School Robert says, “It's the artists painting us. That's what I do. I'm the surrogate for us. I don't go out and say, I think you'd like this. All of these are things that occur to me, stop me. I wonder something like, how would you paint that? How would you get that across? How would you make that statement? I call it naming it. How would you give that thing a name so that someone else would get it?”
Robert wants his paintings to have both a universal meaning and he wants it to be personal. He talks about his painting of the inside of a barn that is hanging in his studio. “Everybody's been in that barn. Even if you haven't, you know what it is. And the fact that I haven't used the classic Pennsylvania Dutch barn sort of wakes you up a little when you come in because it's new. It isn't typical. You come in and you look at it and you know exactly where you are. You can feel the space. You can smell the dirt floor–the little light coming in. It's dark. While I was painting that, one of the farm workers came in. He turned the lights on in the barn because he figured it would help me. And I said, no, you have to turn them back off again. He thought I was crazy to be painting in the dark. But that's what it feels like when you walk in there. And it feels more personal to encounter that place like that. You just walked in the door. You haven't even turned on the lights yet. That smell. The whole encounter.”
Robert uses primarily an earthtone palette. He says that his palette is earth color on the left side with prismatic warm and cool red and blue at the top. “I work out of that left side, that earth palette, basically a Zorn palette or limited palette, whatever you want to call it. I'll work out of three or four colors, dirt colors, to do the majority of the entire painting. But towards the end, when I've set that table, then I can move over to the right side of the palette and introduce that lemon yellow to create the sunlight, and it'll have a contrast. Everything else is dirt, that's the prismatic color, that's the bright. I don't do the dark darks, I don't do the light lights. I do the middle zone, and I make sure that it's kind of earthy, kind of gray. And when I'm done, anything I do to the bottom and the top is much more accentuated because it's against this gray middle background.”
Robert’s paintings bring you right into his experience. A painting of a person standing on a beach in front of the ocean is a powerful and inspiring image. Dorian, Robert’s wife, is standing with her back turned to the viewer and facing the ocean. “You can hear that thunderous crunch of the wave. You know what it's like to stand there. It's just, it's awesome.”
Robert thinks and asks, “How do you paint awesome?” He answers himself saying, “I think you need the person, her gesture, that motionless transfixion focused on the waves, tells you a lot about the waves. Like I can see the light coming through the top of the crest there on the other side. They do that.”
Robert Beck encounters his subjects and catches something in the here and now that is immediate and it speaks to us because it is us. This is the theme of his exhibition at the Morpeth Contemporary Gallery. It is his theme. In the process of pursuing his art, he has received 29 significant painting awards, was a finalist for the Pew Fellowship in 2000, and in 2014 was awarded the Philadelphia Sketch Club Medal for Excellence and Contribution to the Arts by the oldest artists’ club in America. He was the Honored Artist at the 2017 Phillips Mill Exhibition and the New Hope Arts Center Legacy Artist in 2018. In 2020 he was elected a Signature Member of the American Society of Marine Artists.
Here And Now is an exclusive solo exhibition featuring the latest paintings by Robert Beck. This event marks Beck's first solo exhibition since his acclaimed retrospective at the Michener Art Museum and will run from September 14 to October 6, 2024 at Morpeth Contemporary, located at 43 West Broad Street, Hopewell, NJ. To contact the Morpeth Contemporary gallery, call 609-333-9393. For more information, visit www.morpethcontemporary.com.