Full Description
William Beckman paints himself, loved ones and the land he has lived upon, creating edgy portraits and landscapes. His subjects, whether mother or lover, are delivered to the viewer with gripping details, without embelishment. He creates his figurative art using a unique method. He applies paint, then shaves of layer after layer from the surface with a razor, repainting and polishing the canvas to create lustrous, absorbing images. His realism is stripped of sentiment, his idealized portraits scrupulously rendered, and his expansive tracts of Minnesota farmland theatrically scaled. Each painting is epic in significance and matter-of-fact at the same time. This work provides a comprehensive examination of his life and work.
