Ford Beckman (1952–2014)
Biography
Ford Beckman was born in 1952 and has recently passed in 2014. In Beckman, the two great obsession of 20th century art, surface and geometry, seriously converge. The paintings are full of quiet surprises, not forced ones. They emanate residual, stubborn, inexplicable interiority. A Ford Beckman painting is a structure of reversals, of contraries poised in hallucinatory elegance. The precariousness – the sense of imminent change, of spontaneous tilt from light to dark, from edge to core, from seam that shows its staple-stretch marks to smooth surface stretched into stillness, from uncannily unclean whiteness to translucent sabbath white-ness, and vice versa – is deceptive, for it is the oscillation between the terms that counts, not the predominance of one or the other. It is the dualism that is absolute, not one of its parts. Beckman has reawakened the unknown, the nothingness from which pure form arises.
Ford Beckman was born in 1952 and has recently passed in 2014. In Beckman, the two great obsession of 20th century art, surface and geometry, seriously converge. The paintings are full of quiet surprises, not forced ones. They emanate residual, stubborn, inexplicable interiority. A Ford Beckman painting is a structure of reversals, of contraries poised in hallucinatory elegance. The precariousness – the sense of imminent change, of spontaneous tilt from light to dark, from edge to core, from seam that shows its staple-stretch marks to smooth surface stretched into stillness, from uncannily unclean whiteness to translucent sabbath white-ness, and vice versa – is deceptive, for it is the oscillation between the terms that counts, not the predominance of one or the other. It is the dualism that is absolute, not one of its parts. Beckman has reawakened the unknown, the nothingness from which pure form arises.