Jeffrey Beauchamp
Jeffrey Beauchamp
Jeffrey Beauchamp Description
Flying brushstrokes of color inhabit Jeffrey Beauchamp’s paintings, the exuberant marks giving way to recognizable bits of landscape. Beauchamp is a trickster with prodigious skills and a wry sense of humor. He could, should he choose to, paint like a Renaissance painter or Vermeer spiced with bits of Gerhardt Richter and Odd Nerdrum. Instead he lures you in to a more magical space where color rains down like confetti and he sets you down wherever he chooses.
Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Beauchamp’s talents extend themselves to music and writing. He is a voracious reader and student of art history, his large collection of art books often open in his studio. An artistic time traveler, his teachers are the masters from both contemporary and historic epochs. Beauchamp received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has enjoyed a long exhibition history beginning with his frequent exhibitions at Susan Cummins Gallery in Mill Valley in the early 90’s.
Jeffrey Beauchamp Statement
As kids we are generally encouraged to use and cultivate our imaginations, though once we reach adulthood the pressures of everyday existence tend to hone our more practical survival skills and leave our younger minds to fend for themselves. As an artist I can postpone certain aspects of growing up in the name of staying creative: while painting, for instance, I find a sort of disciplined daydreaming works quite well. With these new larger works the daydreaming took the form of squinting into the painty distance, "magic eye" style, and feeling the possibilities of depth and visual adventure in there. The discipline, beyond just showing up in the morning and keeping out of the comfy chair as much as possible, consisted of avoiding any over resolving of the images into too easily digested landscape clichés. The results have, at first, a new vigor and charm that I think bear up under longer scrutiny, the layers of suggestive brush and knife work emerging slowly from the stormy surfaces. It is that balance between the paint itself and deep illusionary space that is more precarious in these pieces, more conflicting and interesting than in most of my earlier work.