Ford Beckman

“All paintings are self-portraits,” Ford Beckman once said. “That’s all really good painters do . . . that’s the part of painting that you can’t teach.” After a successful career as a fashion designer, Beckman emerged as a post-neo-expressionist artist in New York City alongside artists like Ashley Bickerton and Ross Bleckner. His style blended slick, silkscreened pop iconography—including clowns and logo-like symbols such as targets that recall the work of Jasper Johns—with splashes, drips, and elements of geometric and gestural abstraction. But for Beckman, who would later trade the art scene for a quiet life in Tulsa, Oklahoma, art was more than an aesthetic exercise—he compared the practice of painting to prayer.