Jack Beal

Jack Beal’s realist approach makes an ordinary household object the center of attention while exploring formalist flat planes of color, clean lines, and strong contrasts of light. In 1965, when Photorealist painting was first being exhibited, New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Beal’s paintings: “He paints these works with painstaking representational fidelity. Yet the results convey a feeling of fantasy and romance emphatically at odds with their mundane details....There is something a little absurd in painting a blue denim work-shirt as if it were the precious stuff of a Renaissance robe, or in treating an aluminum snow shovel to the luminosity of fine pewter in an old Dutch still life.”