Forum Gallery in New York City is currently presenting a comprehensive exhibition that expands on William Beckman’s passion for rural landscape and its animals.
Through the lens of 10 significant works, Forum Gallery is currently exploring artist William Beckman’s love of landscape. On view now through November 11, “The five oil paintings and an equal number of large-scale charcoal drawings included, all completed since the artist’s last one-person exhibition in 2014, are a return to nature for the Minnesota-born Beckman, who was raised on his parents’ working farm,” the gallery reports. “The farm and its resident bulls and horses are the subjects in the current exhibition.”
In fact, as the gallery notes, from 2008 through 2014, Beckman’s principle artistic concern was with a series titled The Bull Series — 10 large-scale charcoal drawings of bulls. The gallery continues, “The current exhibition expands on his passion for rural landscape and its animals: the principal oil painting in the exhibition, ‘Paint Box,’ is a portrait of a powerful paint horse on the family farm. Horses are also the subjects of the large-scale drawings in the exhibition, while the smaller-scale paintings depict the landscape and different breeds of bulls.
“Power and intensity are the language of William Beckman’s work, and he achieves corresponding measures of each in works ranging from 20 by 18 inches to nearly 10 by 12 feet in size. Working and re-working each element, Beckman does not release a work of art from his studio until he is fully satisfied with the strength of the composition and image he seeks to achieve. His paintings and drawings compel the attention of the viewer through the use of bold color, dramatic, confrontational composition and dynamic eye contact. The dominance of the sky in the low-horizon landscape of hay fields and the bulls and horses seen at close range dominate the viewer with scale and strength.”
To learn more, visit Forum Gallery.
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