Pacific Sun
August 18-August 24, 2004
Rising Suns
12 People to Watch on the Arts & Entertainment Scene
Jeffrey Beauchamp is the kind of guy you want to root for. He's creative, yet grounded; well-read and jovial; confident without being egotistical; and a handsome, charismatic fellow who is simultaneously a self-deprecating family man. Most importantly, he's paid his dues.
The Fairfax-based professional painter, who will turn 40 on August 19, has been cranking away to refine his craft since he graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989.
Originally from Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, Beauchamp attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, after high school. While at Clark he became interested in filmmaking, and thanks to his writer dad's New York advertising world connections, Beauchamp got a chance to experience real life behind the camera. His dad helped him secure work as a crew member for production companies filming TV commercials.
Beauchamp's work on the production crews disillusioned him about the film-making process. The commercials were uncreative, wasteful and too many people had a hand in them. He still had an interest in filmmaking, but thought maybe he should go to art school first to study the old master painters because they could teach him how to create great lighting.
A relative novice at age 23, he struggled at SFAI to get the training he felt he needed. His painterly, 19th century style just wasn't what the faculty was interested in at that point. So he turned to the masters.
"When I was at the Art Institute, my favorite place to go was the library," he reminisces. "They have this incredibly diverse collection of art books—everything from current catalogs to magazines to my favorites, which were all these old monographs and books on painters.
"That was a huge inspiration for many years," he continues, "the history of art."
Beauchamp also found inspiration in his art school buddy Alan Crockett, who is now an associate professor of art at Ohio State University. Crockett was a bit of a wild man technically, doing things with paint that Beauchamp had never even considered. The duo started going out on plein air excursions and had a blast. "It would become this adventure," Beauchamp remembers fondly. "We'd hike and carry paints and go to the top of Mt. Diablo or wherever. It was all new to me. The whole Bay Area was just this amazing garden."
When Beauchamp left SFAI, his focus was primarily on traditional landscape painting. He had received a boost of confidence at his senior show when some faculty members actually purchased his works for their personal collections. Shortly thereafter, he hooked himself up with the Susan Cummins Gallery in Mill Valley. His first show at the gallery garnered a great review in the January 1992 edition of the magazine Art in America.
"The trouble was, after my first show, I got this big review and they [the paintings] were selling-and I kind of froze," Beauchamp explains. "I was pretty young still. I wasn't even 30 yet and I thought that I had to keep doing the same thing in order to keep selling, to keep getting attention from the critics, whatever. So I kind of stopped growing."
He tightened up, which was evident in his second and third shows at the Susan Cummins Gallery. He felt that those paintings were overly tidy, too glossy and looked more like illustrations. But he had to keep working through his frustration—he had a wife (Emma, a fellow student at SFAI), a baby and a house to take care of in Fairfax. He would also hold painting workshops, take commissions and work odd jobs to make ends meet, but his true passion was his own painting. After a few shows, Beauchamp started to relax again in his work. He went on to participate in numerous Northern California group exhibitions as well as exhibit solo at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Then, a few years ago, he began to loosen up in a "big" way. He had been commissioned by a friend to paint a larger piece than he was used to painting, "For whatever reason, I started jumping around and doing this sort of caveman dance while I did it," he says. "It was very unlike my process before that. It was extremely physical and abandoned, kind of like a satyr.
"The results were incredibly exciting for me to see because it was my signature, it was my mark, but large."
Around that same time, Beauchamp moved on to the Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco. Although gallery director Lisa Dolby Chadwick didn't usually show traditional landscape painting, he persuaded her to give his work a try. Since he began working with Chadwick, Beauchamp's work has evolved a great deal. "I was trying to make stuff that I thought would sell because of financial need and all that, but they weren't selling so great and they were a drag to do," he says of the classical landscapes he was doing during that period. "So at some point I said 'screw it' I started busting out with these real loose brush strokes."
"In preparation for his first solo show here [in March 2004] his work really exploded," Chadwick says. "There was a lot more movement in his paint handling and the brush strokes themselves are actually more visible. I think what he is incredible with is his sense of color and the color dialogue within his paintings—and his ability to paint in extremely confident and original landscape, which is rare.
"He's really found his voice within these pieces," she adds. That show of giant abstract expressionist landscapes sold out (prices range from about $2800-$16000). Beauchamp was even able to take his wife and kids on a trip to Hawaii, which was a nice way to show his wife appreciation for all her years of supportiveness.
"I've tapped into a real mother lode, a big vein of potential work," Beauchamp says as he looks toward the future. "I'd like to work even bigger than I'm working now. I have that in me for sure, the energy of the larger paintings kind of flies off the edges."
He's currently looking for a gallery to represent him in L.A. And five years from now, he may just want to see what New York thinks of his work, too. With a young, smart, straight shooter like Chadwick (she's only 37) by his side, Beauchamp seems to be on the road to success. She frankly points out that fame is virtually impossible to predict in the arts (Writer's note: I recently saw a letter from the 1950's in which MOMA declined a work by a young artist named Andy Warhol), but believes that Beauchamp has great potential. "He's so young, he's just got a very bright future," Chadwick says. "He's had so many exhibits and he's always pushing himself and he's very intelligent and extremely talented—so I think he's got the perfect combination.
"He's great," she adds, "I just adore him as a person and as a painter."