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John BeardmanOnly by being as much myself as I can,
can I connect with you. -
Go to where the pain is, then relaxThat’s what I use to tell my students.
I was, as all good teachers are, teaching to save myself.
I was saying what I wanted to learn. -
A natural supernaturalismI want my audience to be immediately struck
by the force of an image,
yet to slowly work to digest it.
WELCOME TO MY ART
In viewing art we are doing a type of collage making. We are visiting other places. Places that are somehow us. Recreating the state of mind that is open and spacious, from which all art and feeling springs. We are remembering what other art looked like, and what we are.
I invite you to took and encourage you to respond to this electronic book. I want the paintings, the philosophy, the observations, and the humor to lead you to where you experience your life, not some thought of your life, but life itself. I would like to know if it does. Get in contact and respond!
Documentation – Step into my Ambiguity
Shows
Right now there are no current shows.
LATEST SHOW: "About Faces" at Noho Gallery, M55, 530 W 25th St, NYC, January 8-26, 2019. Opening reception: Thursday, January 10, 5:30-7:30 pm.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Change is the only constant in life. The Second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, the level of disorder or randomness in the system, is always increasing. It certainly is so with my work. Reconstructing old paintings is revisiting time. In a way it’s reversing time’s direction. In Quantum physics when a single photon is sent through a plank with two slits, it creates interference patterns with itself. (How often have I interfered with myself!) The past was not so much wrong as inexact. Shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. Reconstructing is a form of destroying myself at the same time as searching for myself. It permits me to become, for a moment, two.
To see the flaws in the old approach is to, without abandoning it, bring it into my current view. Repainting is a way of dealing with both the past and present. What results is an opening to the future. Painting on older, sometimes 40 years older, grid structure abstract paintings; I change the emphasis from an abstract form to a recognizable figure such as a face. The tension between these two references maintains interest. The jump is intuitive; the shifting of focus gives an ambiguity of content: lines encompass a form as they destroy it; color highlights a form, but also melts it.
The viewer forms the painting in his/her mind. Their forming is their own: directed by the painting but shaped by who they are. The discovery of something new that was always in us is the root of the power of art. And that change is permanent. The butterfly is no more a caterpillar. The eye and the body that receive the world’s phantasmagoria of impressions are materialized on the canvas with colors and shapes. The many become one. The one doing the perceiving is, for a moment, another.
Time becomes not one directional but cyclical: a loop. In the current vocabulary of physics, it’s a covariant quantum field. Six centuries before Christ, Anaximander of Miletus call it Aperion—the primal substance. I feel a connection to that ancient Greek, as I try to paint the granules of matter.
To revisit an old painting refreshes my current thinking. However to see the flaws in the old approach is, without abandoning it, bringing it into my current view. It’s correcting the past. Dealing with both the past and the present, it’s an opening to the future.
Seeing is a form of touching. I paint loosely until I feel I can touch the face. In some such way, light is composed of particles. I’m acutely aware of my vision, as I’ve experienced extensive damage to my right eye. In this autobiographic statement I find the paintings more potent as they urge with life. Oddly I find the distorted view from that eye reinforces the granular effect of quantum gravity. It's about recomposition. Like Emily Dickinson drafting on chocolate wrappers, I fix my pixilated past.
John Beardman, Pennsylvania, July 2017
Read my new book: Shifting Glances
I’m the teacher and I’ve got a fool for a student, it’s me. It’s true, or at least it’s true enough. The hero’s journey has begun.
Shifting Glances (PDF)
Rent the Art House in Cape Breton
John Beardmans inspiring Studio in Cape Breton, Canada is now a lovely vacation home. Over the last decades, John did most of his artwork in this beautiful retreat on the ocean in Nova Scotia. If you are interested in art and love nature, this is an amazing getaway for your next vacation. There is also a selection of John Beardmans paintings and pottery showcased in the house.
More information you'll find here: www.beardmans.ca
HEAD PUZZLES
Yes, I'm again painting on older, sometimes 40 years older, grid structure abstract paintings, I deliberately change the emphasis from an abstract form to a recognizable figure such as a face.. It's the tension between these two references that maintains interest. The jump is intuitive, however the shifting of focus is intentional, as I’ve always tried to give an ambiguity of content: lines encompass a form as they destroy it; color highlights a form, but also melts it.
Seeing is a form of touching. I paint loosely until I feel I can touch the face.
Time becomes not one directional but cyclical. It's as if time becomes a loop. An open line becomes closed.
Being, an enhanced present, enhances becoming.
Dante’s Barque:
I paint on old paintings for many reasons. When I bring out an older painting that once I had considered finished, the painting now demands a different structure because my world has changed from when I painted it and there is a type of sacrifice in the willingness to destroy your own. I often contradict what I had been. This destruction becomes growth.
Like nature I make new forms of old. I remember nature. I imagine and re-image nature.
Working on this painting after the video was made I changed it; employing techniques that I have learned. This is a conscious intellectual effort to enhance what was an intuitive, precognitive felling state: an impulse. This resulted in making the transitions and form ambiguities more subtle and accentuating the gestural and wave like implications with thin ground-in lines using, of all things, a carborundum grinder!
See the finished Painting
See more Videos
Four Paintings
Here I will introduce you 4 randomly selected paintings. If you want to see more, have a look at my current Paintings 2023.
