The show of Nina Beall’s paintings was a perfect antidote for a cold, gray afternoon in Chicago. I was immediately thawed out by intense burning landscapes that radiate the intense heat of mid-summer. As van Gogh (an artist whom Beall likely holds in high esteem) captured the harsh realities of the open fields of southern France, so Nina Beall conjures up the flat grazing land of the Midwest (specifically of her grandmother’s farm in Texas) and the exotic, semi-tropical settings of the southeast. These locations provide an outlet for Beall’s dramatic, jarring color schemes.

In fact, the color harmonies are so startling and the texture of the paint so thick, it is as if van Gogh had suddenly discovered acrylic paints in the little shop of Pere Tanguy. I mean this as a compliment. Her approach to the subject – the direct, almost violent application of paint, the bright chromatic colors and the rhythmic treatment of the landscape remind me of van Gogh – but the imagery is entirely her own.

These paintings have a strong American flavor. Their gestural quality and the simplification of form follows in the landscape tradition exemplified by painters such as Cole, Burchfield, and Dove. Beall’s work has a vitality and directness that is refreshing in its naivete. Each piece of paint is used to represent something, everything is tangible, from the bark on the trees to the willow branches, down to the individual eaves scattered on the ground, all elements of nature literally modeled out of the paint. I suppose there is always the danger of this approach turning into a formula, but that is not the case in Beall’s current work. The paintings stand as Unique interpretations of nature, with more than a dash of humor.

One of the most pungent, poetic images (found among the most recent works in the show), Landscape with Green Tree and Corn Stalk Bunches, is a bold depiction of landscape after a harvest. The corn has been shucked, and the bright orange corn stalks, piled in neat bundles, are arranged in rows, evenly spaced, receding diagonally across the flat land to the horizon. In the distance, they look like small orange explosions in a violet-gray field. Two gnarled, bulbous trees stand as threatening sentinels in the foreground; their thick and unruly branches have probably long since lost their foliage. Pale orange and yellow leaves lie scattered near the tree’s exposed root. The trees are a sickly purple and pale green, as thought they had been covered with lichen. These menacing yet whimsical forms remind me of the trees that surrounded hapless Ichabod Crane as he rode through Sleepy Hollow. (This is a quality that pervades much of Beall’s work; despite the obviously playful approach to the subject, there is often an underlying sense of foreboding or impending danger.) They are also reminiscent of some of van Gogh’s tortured, writhing tree stumps. Perhaps it is the density of the pigment used to build up the tree’s surface (which actually invades the viewer’s space) that makes them seem so physically aggressive. These trees stand at the edge of the pond that reflects the red-violet sky in the distance. The clouds, like tumbling wads of white cotton, seem to be getting caught in the dark, fingerlike tree branches. The whole scene gives an impression of a dry and fallow landscape that has yielded its bounty and will soon lie dormant for the winter.

The overwhelming power and stark beauty of nature have had a profound effect on Beall’s painting. Beall animates her forms; she seems to be looking for the simplest means of translating such things as hay rolls, tree stumps and waves into paint. For the most part she is successful in this endeavor. However, occasionally, as in the patterns of Toucans and Thirty One Flamingos, the work looks mechanical, somewhat like decorative wallpaper designs. It is when Beall combines dream and memory, with her personal vocabulary of form, that she creates haunting, memorable images. (Robert G. Edelman)