Imminent Perils: To Wonder at Trifles in the Paintings of John Beerman
March 8th, 2022 - July 31, 2022 | Rankin West Gallery
Chatwood Building and Sky, 2016, oil and wax on linen (Photo: John Beerman)
John Beerman’s paintings are uncommonly contemporary in their glimpses of natural and built environments. He carefully frames the landscape, illuminating its beauty without erasing the persistent trespass of human development; rigid edges of buildings, dilapidated fences, and straying power lines are just as much part of Beerman’s compositions as the tranquil skies, rippling waterways, and sprawling fields. In these honest representations of precarious landscapes, Beerman quietly captures the anxiety and the awe of experiencing Nature’s beauty in the 21st-century.
In a lecture given at Wellesley College in 1941 titled The Art of Literature and Commonsense, eminent author and critic Vladimir Nabokov urged his listeners to value experiences of wonder over commonsense principles. Nabokov emphasized a seemingly irrational “capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril... and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.” Like Nabokov’s rejection of prudence, John Beerman’s paintings, if given sufficient time and attention, disrupt assumptions about beautiful pictures and their ability to teach us about the world we are living in.
This exhibition gathers together new works alongside earlier paintings to trace Beerman’s approach to the landscape. Often painting places that are gone, disappearing, or changing irrevocably, the artist uses a variety of techniques to articulate the uncertainty of these specific places and spaces, frozen in time on his canvas.
Tire Shed, 2011, oil on linen (Photo: John Beerman)
Late Summer, 2021, oil on linen (Photo: John Beerman)
Six Acre Parcel Looking East, Late Afternoon, with Telephone Poles, 2017, oil and egg tempera on linen (Photo: John Beerman)
