February 1988
Nina Beall at
Graham Modern
I thought that some lines by the late Poet Laureate of England, Sir John Betjeman, as I looked, with stunned appreciation, at Nina Beall’s outrageously expressionist and apocalyptic landscapes “Hear how the beech trees/roar above Glencara./See how the fungus/circles in the shade./Roar trees and moan you/gliding royal daughters./Circle us with poison,/ we are not afraid.” Though they relate the misdeeds of a bold, bad Irish baronet, to me these lines capture the flavor of these very American paintings. For Beall – a young painter, born in Texas and now living in Chicago – has esthetic roots that run deep in the tradition of what could be called “horror Romanticism,” as exemplified by the writing of Ambrose Bierce or the paintings of John Quidor, who devoted his career to depicting scenes of witchery, dark legend and gloomy terrors. Quidor
actually made a living by painting
signs and the figures on coaches and fire engines; similarly, one supposes that Beall could be a successful painter of amusement park fun houses – a genuinely American mode of popular expression.
This was Beall’s first solo show in New York (she’s had several in the Midwest and Philadelphia). At present, there are no “gliding royal daughters” in her landscapes – only enormous crows, cows, egrets or cranes, and dead trees. Beall begins each painting by laying down a thin stain of acrylic color. Over this she works up a heavy impasto, using a gel-like medium to produce the forms of her plants, trees, animals, etc., each standing out separately.
Twisting eddies of clouds occupy her skies, which glare red or orange in the last moments before the arrival of a gray, colorless twilight followed by darkness. The trees – mostly black, yet often veined with red or blue – leap like ballet dancers on pointe in a dance of death, while the electric yellows of Saint Elmo’s fire flicker over swamps or parched fields.
All of Beall’s paintings impressed me, especially Gathering of Crows, with its clouds like cotton swabs stained with blood; Round the Bend, whose rocks resemble pillows made of spun sugar, and whose trees toss black and fretful in the background like the witches in Macbeth; Twinkling Night, in which stars drown in the sky, as fiery streamers burst from an oil-soaked ground; and Lightning, with its poisonous-green lily pads languishing in water tinged with fierce reds.
Beall invents everything in her landscapes – as though no such subjects had ever before been painted in this regard, she reminds me of those artist-officers in the British Colonial Army sent to America who, a century before the Hudson River School, tried to cope with waterfalls, cliffs, storms and raw, unclassifiable nature, imagery that the polite artistic tradition dismissed as unsuitable for art. In her lurid, somewhat Gothic depictions of the land, Beall, too, seems to be moving into new, uncharted territory. – Lawrence Campbell
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