HUMBLE

A new series of paintings and drawings by William Beckman depict American landscapes that appear infinite with meaning and effect.

- BY DAVID MASELLO

Bel Air Farm Summer, 2020, oil on panel, 9% x 23%" William Beckman. Courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York.

The view from a tractor is a long one. It's a vista that endures. When the prolific American painter William Beckman (b. 1942) was growing up on a Minnesota farm, he recalls riding his family's tractor "thousands of times" into the fields of corn, beans and sugar beets. "When you grow up on a farm, you memorialize it, have it locked into your brain, what you've looked at so often," he says from his home and studio in New York's rural Dutchess County, some 85 miles north of New York City.

Even though his boyhood tasks on the family farm, situated on the Minnesota border near South Dakota, were performed decades ago, Beckman clearly remembers the flat, seemingly infinite landscapes so well that he paints them still from memory. Many of his bucolic scenes of green fields punctuated with rolled bales of hay, all overseen by explosions of white clouds, are featured in a solo show of 22 of his works, William Beckman: On the Horizon. The exhibition, presented by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and on view through June 30, was first suggested and organized by Beckman's longtime dealer, Forum Gallery in New York City.