Pamela Beck by Barbara Guggenheim
Pamela Beck’s art practice is concerned with pushing the limits of abstraction. Her works are elegant, powerful, eye-popping, and optimistic; they’re distinctive at every turn. Through several series, she’s striven to capture light and motion. Following a successful career as a novelist, Beck approaches making art with the same interest in narrative that drove her forward in her former career, only she does it through visual means rather than
words.
What look like formalist abstractions are much more. Beck is interested in exploring concepts of the unseen. She makes visible that which you cannot see - time and space, and motion becomes palpable in Beck’s ever-changing vocabulary of color and geometry. Like expansive American 19th century landscape paintings of the west, with their infinite expanse of open space, Beck’s works give you the sense that they, too, could go on forever, and she simply cuts them as an abbreviation. When viewing a diptych or triptych, hung with swathes of space between panels, you feel as if you’re reading a story which takes a pause before it continues.
“Fascinated by how colors merge and transcend the limits of their original hues, I experiment within an abstract world of fantastical shapes, reflections, movement, and trippy explosions of color.
When working in the dark, my camera lens picks up a collision of colors and shapes that are invisible to the human eye. It’s an instant in time - something I can’t recreate. I’m literally drawing with color and light.”
