When out painting the landscape, I often get excited by the what is going on outside the painting’s boundaries and thought; “if only I could include more”. Perhaps keep adding more paintings until reaching 360 degrees. (of course, more often the exact opposite is probably a better plan – to narrow the view, but that is another story) Yesterday I happened on a link to a painter who actually did this, all painted from life. I can’t properly display the panorama here so I am just providing a link to the panorama on Kevin Beers site.
Regretfully, it’s difficult to properly view the work scrolling, not really being able to see the work as a whole. Working with a painting so impossibly long, as he states on his website, “consists of 16 16″ X 20″ canvases with a total length of almost 27 feet” would be challenging to get the painting to work as a whole. This is a compelling idea and a great challenge to give yourself but could risk falling into realm of gimmickry. Viewing it online I am unable to fairly judge. The individual panels are all marvelously seen and painted.
Also of note are his small urban landscapes. I wish the images on his site were bigger, difficult to see so small. He has also received attention for his painting of old trucks and American Artist magazine did a story on him in 2000 as well as some automobile magazines.
Kevin shows at the Gleason Fine Art Galleries, Allen Sheppard Gallery, Smith-Killian Fine Art He lives in
Brooklyn, NY and studied at the SUNY New Paltz and the Art Students League of New York. Kevin also spends his summers on Monhegan Island in Maine for the past twenty years or so.
Painting Perceptions was started in 2009 by Larry Groff to promote the ideas, practice and experience of painters working from observation in a modernist vein from around the world through interviews, essays, videos and community. It later evolved to include imagination-based and abstract painting as well.
some interesting stuff here. I think the trucks are the strongest work, this is where Beers seems the most interested in the subject. I would like to see larger images of the people portraits, esp. after seeing the self portrait at the bottom of the index.
still, i have to agree about the gimmickry aspect. ..i suppose anyone who has worked on landscape paintings feels the desire to expand the boundaries, the size of the canvas, to include more. but i feel most painters desire to do so in order to add another weight, or space, or rhythm to the painting. i think doing a 360 panorama might be an interesting experiment, but does it make for strong painting?
and I automatically think of rackstraw downes, who does address these issues in some detail in his book that came out a few years ago. thing like how much to include in the painting (when to stop adding), and panoramic seeing. of course, rackstraw is interested in how one’s perception changes as the eye scans the landscape FROM A FIXED POINT. a rotating panorama is a different question. Looking at Beers panorama reminds me of seeing Downes quite long panorama at the MOMA, i believe. a seascape/seashore painting that is about a foot high by 8-10 feet long, as i recall. and I remember not liking Downes painting for the same reason, thinking it was this arty gimmick, too conceptual.
by the way: Downes, Neil Welliver, George Nick, Chuck Close, Janet Fish, and others, were all in the same school, same year, or very close to being so, at Yale. And they were all very interested in process, or we might call it Strategy in most of their cases. Strategy, an adoption of some program, some criteria for proceeding, and making a painting. Probably most evident is Chuck Close with the squaring up and painting top to bottom, left to right, square by square. Welliver is very different, but does have his own strategy. As painterly as Nick is, we can see a relationship to both Welliver and Close to this process-thinking. What I have often wondered, is…why aren’t images of Rackstraw’s works in progress available? We often see Close in progress, we read Welliver and Nick discussing their process. So while much is given in terms of Downes as a draughtsman, searching for the right site to work from, and then the composition, ..I wish we could see some paintings in progress. And i have to admit it makes me a bit suspicious that these are not available to be seen. I don’t think
Downes is ..”cheating” or anything of the like, whatever that means, but..
anyway, pardon my digression, but Beers work is making me think of Downes in terms of Panorama, and George Nick in terms of old cars.
(finally, i also think of Stanley Lewis, who has at least one painting of an old ford pickup on a farm. And Stanley really does bring a no-holds-barred approach to radically ADDING dimensions to his support (or/and trimming away dimensions) as the painting requires.