S
Mason���s Bay Remembered, oil on panel, 12 x 24���
ometimes it seems to us that mainstream
contemporary art is all exegesis, all interpretation, all
difficulty. It sometimes encourages one almost defiantly
to say, ���Look our private taste in painting is for classical
representation: David, Ingres, Fantin-Latour, for example.
��� We are pleased, we are gratified by a good landscape,
still-life or portrait, executed without the elements of irony
or self-deprecation. There is a contemporary tendency in
art even to doubt art itself. Having said that, our taste in art
is as broad as the Great Plains.
Donald Beal might at first glance appear to be far removed
from these antecedents, but he is every bit the classicist,
every bit a manifestation of that world. Manifestation is the
operative word. In a thoroughly 21st century hand, he deftly
renders the classic modern, without sacrificing the artistic
language that so draws one to David and Ingres, if for no
other reason than their important position in art history.
HYLAND
