Jeffrey Beauchamp’s current work is a hybrid and a culmination: bringing together painterly landscape with a free-flowing narrative cobbled from disparate figurative images.
Since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1990 Beauchamp has shown steadily at West Coast galleries and museums, recently hanging his 11th solo show at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, where he debuted this latest style. This marked a real departure from the pure landscape he had become known for, says Beauchamp “I‘ve wanted to paint the figure forever but couldn’t solve the problem of fitting people and things into my increasingly hectic landscapes without a nagging feeling of contrivance.” While working on a pivotal piece Beauchamp decided to force the issue, setting Tintin’s Professor Calculus alongside a disgruntled nude from Mayfair magazine. Since that “eureka!” moment he’s become “an image farmer, or rather hunter-gatherer, and the entire visual universe is just a vast savannah of raw material for these mash-up paintings. The real and imaginary characters of my life have immigrated into the painted world and they are welcome to act out any number of plays in these permanent mazes of possibility, for my glory or humiliation.”
