A Word About Stephen Beal's Grid Paintings

Stephen Beal paints with oil, acrylic and gouache on linen canvases and on wooden panels, usually of relatively small size. He paints in monochromes or closely toned hues, his paint marks organized within a penciled grid structure following systems he has for the most part pre-determined before he starts, although he will sometimes adjust in response to serendipity in mid-painting. His means may be largely calculated, but his result is always a surprise. 

The grid enjoys a well-established history in modernism from Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg to Agnes Martin and Sol Lewitt, and yet Beal has managed to claim it as his own, largely through the sensitivity of his touch. The power of Beal’s paintings to generate fresh imagery belies both the modesty of their size and the long-established tradition from which they are spawned. On first viewing Beal’s work, one might be drawn to their tuned rhythms and the quiet resonance of their color, or perhaps by the authority with which these intimately scaled works command the gallery walls around them. Closer inspection reveals the embedded nuances of Beal’s paint application. Almost conversely, the subtlety of the paint comes across at the same time as the rigor of its application, the patterned organization of the drawing.

Beal’s real accomplishment, however, is how the paintings manage to move past a repetitive staccato into structured imagery. These works that are so logical and reductive in their inception transcend the means of their making as he builds upon layers of choices: many material selections, incremental measurements, and tactile rituals. Paradoxically, he ends up crafting an immaterial and incalculable radiance. Before he even begins to paint, Beal already knows the lay of the land. He knows the shape, dimensions and fabric of his support. He has chosen his medium, the kind of paint he will use, and his brush, the tool with which he will apply it. He has measured the spacing of the warp and weft of his penciled armature, selected his colors, and firmly established a regular percussion for the laying down of his stroke, a system. The stretch and rhythm of his mark is already determined, building to a kind of slow crescendo. This accumulative progression is common to many of his colleagues painting in other modes, but Beal’s tracks are more easily traced because of the organizational quality of his image, and because the very nature of the grid is to splay things out.

The grid in Beal’s paintings functions not only as an underlying structure, the bones of his painted body, but also as a motif, as much so as might a portrait or a bowl of fruit. As a motif, the grid is responsive to our time and place, for we are culturally acclimated to its outreach, from the sense impressions of urban living to the implications of the distributed networks that link us all together. The grid as endlessly varied thing to paint has in a sense become for our era what perhaps the Madonna and Child might have been for another. We have grown accustomed through digital imagery to how a screen of pixels dissolves into math at close scrutiny while coalescing into organic form at a distance. When we zoom in again and the image once more disintegrates into points on a grid, we speak of this as a limit of resolution. The short strokes of Beal’s painting also merge at a short distance into values, both chromatic and cultural. They do not, however, lose resolution upon close inspection. On the contrary, Beal’s mark rewards close inspection as the ineffable ingredient that lifts his work beyond the predictability of mechanical standards, revealing his physical presence, his breathing and his heartbeat, and the sudden intrusion of a noise outside the studio door. Through the vestige of his touch, we can track his humanity.