Words by Marc Haefele, Senior Arts Writer, Bermudez Projects
But to Beckmann, collage is great art – just as it was to greats like George Braque and Pablo Picasso, when they re-invented it over a century ago, and to subsequent modern artists as diverse as Matisse and Max Ernst. For Beckmann, her art was a late vocation – she was overcome by an urge to create just a decade ago, when she was 40 and in charge of a sizable design firm in Portland, Oregon. With her liberal arts background she had ended up “doing everything I could do.” Except create.
“Goals were what you were supposed to have,” she said of her upbringing. “Meaning the right car, the right house, the right shoes.” But that was not enough for her.
“I was always jealous of people who knew what they wanted to do,” Beckmann said, having never quite figured that out for herself.
Then one day, as part of an office project intended to spark staff creativity, she was told she had to do something artistic. She took some materials on hand – including some old magazines – and created her first collage.
And thus found the answer to the question of what do with the rest of her life. Partly, it was the atmosphere of Portland in its creative salad days that gave her the courage to try being an artist, even if it involved doing her collages on weekends while working part time in cafes and doing gigs for firms like Adidas. But she then moved to Long Beach, California, where she found she could still make her art while doing marketing work from her home.
She recalls the deep-seated thrill of her first sale. “It still blows my mind when someone wants to buy my art,” she says now. At one point, she sublet an apartment with a storefront in Laguna, and “I sat in a chair on the sidewalk” as she happily sold her work to passersby right in the heart of Southern California’s oldest arts colony. She later did the same from an antiques gallery in Long Beach. Such environments enhance her work, which is pleasingly eclectic, and reflects her “love of old things,” which are somehow made bright and new in her work.
She says, “I’m a massive fan of things that are old, of thrift shops and other old stores and businesses.” She loves things like old rubber stamps and heavy, ancient office desks. In collage, she says, “Categorizing is part of the creative experience.” Yet, much her work simply evokes nature – flowers and insects – while some of it suggests modern painters such as Leger and De Kooning. As she progresses, Beckmann finds that she is introducing new complexities, denser layering, larger spaces – her later work is as much construction as collage. More complicated textures abound, along with surprising juxtapositions of shapes and colors. She has even helped create a video of one of her works, called So It Goes, which suggests an entire autumnal experience in a very few moments. “It was my work coming to life,” she says.
These days, Beckmann works out of her attic studio in her mother’s home in Montauk, New York, where she feels increasingly part of the Eastern Long Island artist scene that goes back for over 70 years. And of course she is doing what she wants to do.
“This is mine, my art. I let it happen on my own time line.”
