Fran Beallor
STORY
Every day I feel incredibly fortunate to be living the life of an artist, and in particular a female artist. The freedom and gratification of a life of exploration and artistry, even in the years where I struggled with the business end and sold few works, make it all worthwhile. I started creating art when I was very young. My mother, Dolores Beallor, a graduate of Music and Art High School (now LaGuardia) and Brooklyn College, like me was an artist, an art teacher, and a feminist, so my education began early.
Perhaps because I grew up doing art, and because friends and family always called me “the artist,” I didn’t think about art as a career. It was something I did, like eating and breathing. Later it occurred to me that I could embrace a career as an artist, although in my youth there were no classes in how to run an artist’s business. I had to figure it out on my own. Later, courses were offered in the “business of art,” and I even taught such courses myself. One of the most compelling projects that grew out of teaching other artists was starting a business running Artists’ Support Groups for women, which I did for a number of years.
My young life was infused with culture. I grew up in New York City going to museums and galleries with my parents. They were very sophisticated, taking me to the opera, theater, and gourmet dinners, as well. My early work was strongly influenced by what I saw in the museums, especially works by artists like Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Vermeer. At age 14, I began studies with the late, great artists Roger Van Damme, August Mosca and Charles Pfahl. My first efforts were darker, moody works. I was still learning how to see color. Later I attended Antioch College, the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the Art Students League, and studied anatomy, printmaking, sculpture and figure drawing.
After I moved out of my family home, I had early success. I was awarded a Greenshields Grant for young realists, won an American Artist Magazine prize, and at 21, had my first one woman show at the John O’Rourke Gallery on Madison Avenue (the “Chelsea” of that era). Having learned all I could from my teachers, I found that my style became brighter and I was more experimental with my approach. This wasn’t a conscious decision, but I noticed it and ran with it.
Back in the 80s, if I could have fit 100 objects into my paintings, I would have. I wanted to paint everything! And I love color, although at one point I decided to try an exercise in spare, architectural composition. l did a series of interiors: empty white-washed rooms. The whites were luminous with shades of gray, pink and blue melding into shadowy tones. In one painting I included symbols for the passage of time: a vanishing table and chairs, and an open window. The theme of Time and similar symbols continue to surface in my work. I visited my then beau, artist Eli Levin in Santa Fe, NM. Eli introduced me to the Ernesto Mayans Gallery, where I had my third successful solo show.
By the mid 80s I was showing with the Sherry French Gallery and later at Grand Central Art Galleries both on 57th St. (the “new Madison Ave.”) My Tranquility of the East series using objects and kimonos from the Far East demonstrated my still life sensibilities, the refining of my style, and greater success with discerning color. As I gained experience as an artist, I was able to see more and more colors. For a time I felt I needed to paint every one. And if a color wasn't turning out just right, I'd have to keep going until I got it perfect. At some point I realized that I could choose which colors to include or not. This was quite liberating! In 1988 these works and more were shown in a solo exhibition at the Nicholas Roerich Museum in NYC.
Often, after doing a still life series, I have felt the need to paint people - I like to go back and forth. This understanding of the path my art has followed has made it easier to get back on track when I feel stuck, allowing me to attack problems from a more conscious perspective.
I have a pretty good sense of what scenes, objects or concepts attract me again and again. For instance, in my still lifes, there are certain objects I just adore painting. One is a little wooden figurine, a running rabbit that makes me think of Alice in Wonderland: “I'm late! I'm late!" At some point I realized that this fits in with that larger theme: Time. I think a lot about how to convey motion and the passage of time in my two-dimensional worlds. Mirrors, doors and windows are all important symbols for me. An open window can also symbolize an open mind which allows ideas in and out. Doors lead to other ideas, as well, while mirrors are a way of viewing time and looking at the inner self. Some symbols attract me as concepts, while others are purely visual - the curve and form of the symbol.
Early on I also experimented with more psychological and overtly feminist statements. Working from imagination, I did distorted self-portraits, drawings and paintings of childhood pain and the difficulties of relationships. I found these experimental pieces to be very frustrating. They weren't particularly well-received by galleries or my friends and they never quite took off, so I abandoned them. But now looking back at those psychologically driven ideas, I could imagine going back and re-examining them.
In many ways, my studio has always been a refuge for meditation and quiet, but in the early 90s I had an intense desire to respond through my art to the Gulf War and Middle East tensions. As a cultural Jew, with family and friends living in Israel and a belief in a two-state solution, I created Middle East Peace, a series of still lifes in which Israeli, Arabic and American objects coexist in a muted, desert-colored palette, sometimes with a self-portrait. After September 11, 2001, turbulence re-entered my studio, as it did for many, and I painted a triptych of 12x12 oils, one of which is part of the Unity Canvas, a collection of paintings first shown at the NY Historical Society and now in the permanent collection of the September 11 Memorial Museum here in NYC. One panel is of my four-year-old son with the burning world trade center reflected in his young eye. Another shows the exploding tower through his semi-transparent head, as he and we struggle to make sense of it.
1994 was an exciting time in my career. I had a solo retrospective at the William Carlos Williams Center for the Arts in Rutherford, New Jersey. I was unsure about how I would fill three floors of gallery space, but in the end, I had to leave many pieces out.
By the mid 1990s, I was married with a family. The market crashed and both my galleries closed. My home studio space—and painting time—were squeezed considerably. Time became an even bigger issue and I began to chart my hours. I decided to create smaller works containing fewer objects and found that with less elements crammed in, the dynamic between the objects becomes even more fraught with meaning. My Accidental Encounter series emerged from a desire to "lighten up." I began to paint my collection of antique and ethnic toys sometimes floating, flying and falling through space, resulting in “not-so-still” life paintings which employed an even looser style. I used reflective objects to bring my studio into the painting, managing to further complicate my “simple,” paintings with curving spaces. As my life grew turbulent with the unending energy of young children, my studio became even more of a haven. In 1997 I had a solo show of these works at Union County College Gallery in Cranford, New Jersey. I continued this series for many years and had several more solo shows, including one at Lotus Fine Arts Gallery in Woodstock, NY in 2008 and at Guild Gallery in Chelsea in 2012. In 2015 one work became part of the permanent collection of the Copelouzos Art Museum in Athens, Greece. More works from the series are currently on display at J Pocker Gallery in Bronxville, NY.
Around 1998 I joined the New York Artist Circle (NYAC) a supportive monthly artist networking group. As an experienced facilitator of artist support groups for women, and a member of NYAC for 20 years, I find it gratifying to help this artist community by sitting on the steering committee and co-chairing meetings. Many opportunities have come through this affiliation, including a very large commission. In 2012 I was approached by a New York City collector who saw my work on the NYAC website. I successfully completed four life sized portraits and a large ceiling mural for him. And it was also through the NYAC that I was introduced to the New York Society of Women Artists.
In 2000, I began to focus more on drawing. I revisited an idea I had begun in 1980, when I had done one self-portrait drawing every day for a year as a visual diary. In ‘80 I managed about 8 months, but in 2000 I was determined to complete the year. The portraits were drawings and collages, photos, watercolors and even a bit of sculpture. Honestly, there were times when the last thing I wanted to do was sit down and look at myself in a mirror, at best a fraught occupation for women. But I did it … and did it again in 2010! What a change it made to have digital photography as a tool. I could easily shoot myself at any angle for reference. The 2010 series of 365 twenty cm square drawings were all shown together at NYC’s Westbeth Gallery in 2014. When I look back at the pictures from 1980 and even 2000, I notice how young I was. Looking at the 2010 portraits, it occurs to me that there's much more character in my older face; it's much more interesting. I am looking forward to the upcoming portrait-a-day in 2020.
Next I began several concurrent drawing series. In 2012, inspired by an enormous heirloom tomato, I started drawing Ugly Fruit, fruits and vegetables that exhibit non-standard beauty. The title is meant to be ironic. In 2014, a trip to Alaska inspired, Portraits of Glaciers. Flying over the spectacular, rutted glacial coastline between Anchorage and Juneau motivated me to create a series of aerial views of glaciers around the world. Traveling is an ongoing inspiration, influencing my art in unexpected ways. As I travel, I collect memories, sketches, photos and objects that I may use later in my artwork.
With a distressed eye on the course of climate change, I continued in the vein of environmental art with a still life series, Dead Horse Bay. These works, shown in 2018 at Drawing Rooms Gallery in Jersey City, NJ and again at Friday Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, were inspired by loosened landfill flotsam and detritus washed up on the shores of a Brooklyn beach. Most recently I was invited to participate in an international traveling exhibition, with the theme “One Thing to Remember.” For me, that one thing is our tenuous and threatened connection to nature. In a new series I paired humans with endangered animal species in a series of intense portraits.
Like my mother, I am also an art teacher and have taught all ages, young children through seniors. But my main focus is helping middle schoolers who want to attend art high schools and high schoolers who want to apply to art colleges. During this significant period, they are not only learning critical skills, but are forming their identities as artists, and many of them as young women. I find this way of giving back hugely gratifying.
I was proud to be accepted as a member of the New York Society of Women Artists in 2016. I have always considered myself a feminist and a feminist artist. Although for the most part my work does not directly address the issue of women’s rights, the very act of being a professional woman in any field is in itself a kind of feminism. My career has evolved over the past 45 years and I am heartened by the new and renewed interest in the lives of female artists. It is time that we take our rightful place in the history of art as well as in today’s art world.