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Jack Beal, 1931-2013
When Jack Beal won a commission to paint murals for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1974, he built a new studio whose skylights appear in the background of this lithograph. Beal, one of the few realist artists of his era to paint from life rather than from photographs, thoughtfully reinterpreted what he saw in the mirror. Here, he shaped the fall of the light so that his visor's shadow would cut his face diagonally in half and leave his eyes intriguingly obscured. Beal chose to show himself in a long-sleeved plaid shirt whose grid of lines let him model the fabric's surface while compositionally balancing the diagonals of the skylights. As in all his realist art, he marshaled every element in the image to communicate his own ideas. Beal asks us to imagine that the realm inside the image is, as he once put it, "a world that is as real as this world."
1974 |