Philadelphia Daily News

October 31, 1986

By DAN GERINGER, Staff Writer

Nina Beall – whose huge, wildly colorful, breathtakingly muscular landscapes of Texas and Louisiana are currently at the Cadme Gallery, 2114 Locust St. – grew up in Grand Saline, Texas, a tiny town that literally sits on salt.

“Grand Saline is one of the Morton Salt Company’s largest salt mines,” the 31-year-old Beall, now based in Chicago, says in her lilting East Texas twang. “So the salt caves connect up right under the town. Kids would bring blocks of salt to school and take a lick and pass it back and work on all their childhood immunities that way.”

A gently ironic sense of play is always waiting just around the corner in Beall’s brown eyes. Her paintings, on the other hand, are seriously sensual. She can do more with dead trees dancing along the banks of a swampy river than most artists can do with reclining nudes.

“Grand Saline,” she explains with affectionate humor, “has the only Salt Palace in America. It is a one-room building made completely out of salt. It has arches. It looks kind of like a cross between the Alamo and a small filling station.

“It stands at Grand Saline’s one red light, out on Route 80 to Dallas. There’s a sign in front of it that says it is the only known Salt Palace in northern America. They were hoping that maybe, if you happened to catch the red light, you might see the palace and be curious enough to visit. I don’t think they get crowds.”

Beall spent her childhood in Grand Saline and at the 1860 American Gothic heart-of-pine farmhouse of her paternal grandmother, Zula Mae Beall, in nearby Rusk.

“Real piney woods country,” Beall says. “Rolling hills, lots of creeks and lakes. I grew up sitting on my grandmother’s front porch, counting her cows. That’s probably how I learned to count.

“My grandmother taught me how to make preserves and jellies and homemade bread. She killed chickens and snakes for dinner. She is a Victorian lady and a pioneer woman rolled into one.”

Beall’s grandmother, now 96, had major surgery last summer to remove the lower part of her stomach. “The next day,” Beall remembers, “she was saying, ‘Help me up! Get me out of here!’ I talked to her last week and she told me, ‘I feel fit enough to fight a bear.’ “

Beall clearly loves her grandmother’s feisty spirit. Her painting reflects that same kind of strength, although it didn’t start out that way.

”My grandmother’s kitchen wallpaper was a pattern of a rooster surrounded by hens,” Beall remembers. “When I first started, I was really influenced by the wallpapers and the kitsch, and I painted pasture scenes that were directly like the view from my grandmother’s front porch.

“But going from age 22 to 31, things happen to you and you change. My painting used to be more about life’s absurdities. Maybe those absurdities got a little too close to me and didn’t seem as funny to me after that.”

IF YOU GO

Nina Beall ‘s landscapes at Cadme Gallery, 2114 Locust St., today and Tuesday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Info: 545-6066.