Pamela Beach insider her University of Utah studio. Image courtesy of the artist.

Just inside the gallery door, a single painting stops those entering and announces that what waits beyond may be different than a lifetime of viewing has led them to expect. Two pre-adolescent girls with snarling mouths and hands like claws seem poised to attack each other. Only the title that captions the scene—“You be the Lion…I’ll be the Bear” gives away that this is play: specifically the kind that is the opposite not of work, but of reality. For this play is also a task, just as puppies and kittens practice their skills by hunting each other. Here the artist opens a view into the intimate, adult-averse world shared by children. Behind this one image, two dozen more reveal what painter Pamela Beach has been doing during her MFA studies at the U of U, to wit: making a mother’s access to her family’s inner life the next step in a remarkable return to ways of perceiving, thinking and doing that actually predate her long-ago choice to create and inhabit a family.

In her practiced, but unusually candid telling of her own story, she says she always saw herself as an artist, even though for the longest time she did not deliberately make art. Yes, she drew all the time, building drafting skills at the proper age to make them a working part of how her mind and body collaborate, but not until high school did she begin to formally employ her burgeoning ability. Then, instead of taking classes, she did what preternaturally skillful, artistic acolytes have always done, and should. She skipped the invitation to spend time among the curious who lack either a vocation or self-direction, and sought out individual lessons from working artists. This, of course, is how artists have learned from the beginning, with masters giving personal attention to apprentices.

In doing so, Beach chose, perhaps unwittingly, to embrace what the ancient Greeks would surely have labeled her “tragic flaw”—a flaw, to invert Shakespeare’s phrase, not in herself, but in her stars. It’s also an irony, because a man can “have it all,” including both parenting six children and having a self-indulgent career as an artist. He may choose to have someone else to do the labor of caring for his children, but for Beach that would surely have negated the whole point of creating them. Yet during the years when her children were dependent on her, she continued to paint on the side. We need now to understand that learning comes about primarily by example—models that the natural student learns by imitating.

Pamela Beach, ““You be the Lion…I’ll be the Bear”

When Beach saw her children eagerly copying her painting, she incorporated art into their studies, leading to a period of time she nominally associates with the chalk-on-sidewalk school of art, though her process was far more conscious and creative. Because her kids wanted to be outside as much as possible, she moved her drawing out where they were, meanwhile forging creative play for them. While they initially resisted her inadvertently obtrusive efforts to observe them, it seems likely that having them as subjects played a crucial part in how her work eventually turned out.

There’s a whole genre of art that doesn’t have a proper name, though it draws upon at least three of the most longstanding forms: portrait, figure and story. That may sound like illustration, but illustrators commonly work from the inspiration of others, whose ideas and stories they give visible form. Much closer are the delightful and engaging, late Impressionist images of boating parties and dance halls done by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Impressionism, however, employed the artist’s immediate environment to depict modernity, the new life taking shape late in the 19th century. Pamela Beach has rather demonstrated mastery of a form that uses physiognomy, posture, and scenic details to offer a much more elaborate portrait not so much of her historical time, but truly of her subjects, who inhabit and largely produce it.

After making the deeply-considered decision to return to the university and work towards an MFA, Beach experimented successfully with this nameless approach to portraying subjects whom she credits with generously enabling her efforts. In late 2022, she showed 14 remarkably original portraits at BDCA, each of which set the subject, faithfully depicted, in a richly symbolic setting and surrounded by objects that were effectively props from their stories. That she had time to get to know so much about them wasn’t surprising—such thorough portraits do take time—but it was a portent of how popular she was to become among her new colleagues that she genuinely felt the interest to encounter them. To take just one example, her purchase award-winning portrait of her fellow artist, Allison Neville, features her in a field of mushrooms, which were among both Neville’s artistic subjects and personal interests.

What Beach seems to have experienced as a sea-change in her subject matter feels to an outsider more of a natural progression, even an evolution. As moving as those early portraits were, they couldn’t fully integrate the often-invented locations and artifacts that surrounded her subjects. That’s not an insurmountable obstacle, but it did lend support to the alternative she eventually chose. Painting her six children, their friends, and even their parents, allowed her to use natural and authentic versions of those essentials that reveal truths lying beneath their surface appearances.

Pamela Beach, “Sunday Morning:Bryan and Aggi, Again”

This is the point where recent criticism likes to draw on terms like “seamless” to describe paintings like “Sunday Morning:Greta Reading,” in which a daughter lies in her bed, swathed in blankets and immersed in a book, or the astonishing “Sunday Morning:Bryan and Aggi, Again,” in which both subjects are still asleep. But Beach has taken great pains in these and the other paintings to disrupt the visuals—to “seam” them as often as possible. These are her interpretations of what is, at bottom, her loved ones’ personal property: their images, their activities, their lives. Lest the viewer forget this dichotomy, perhaps even transgression, she’s strewn the scene with reminders of the distance between these seemingly real visions and whatever the truth may actually be: evidence that was present from the outset, but which has become more sophisticated as she’s progressed. A powerful, cognitive example appears in “The Youngest,” in which she’s split the image of her husband holding their child and swapped the halves, which now look as though their picture is a video that has lost its horizontal hold.

This is where it’s really helpful to see the work in person. That “glitch” suggests a philosophical, or even psychological reading: these moments, some of them intimate and many of them mundane, are like frames from a pre-digital motion picture. They occur again and again, each time the same yet each time unique. In person, in the gallery, these paintings are full of such hints. One of the more remarkable, “Now I Pretend I am on a Leash,” makes pencil a medium every bit as crucial as the oil paint it sometimes lends direction to, while at other times it overruns. All this happens on the way to layering three contrasting figures that suggest the dilemma of the artist who starts something, changes her mind, and then repents having spontaneously painted out the first version in favor of another. Or are these vividly captured states of mind? The ethical beauty of this image is that the artist chooses to liberate the audience into their own story, rather than limiting interpretation to the challenge of deciphering hers.

Of course it’s important that viewers not overlook the technical brilliance of how the images are constructed. In this one, the space is flawlessly filled by figures connected by their feet. In other paintings, Beach’s revelatory backgrounds have disappeared, such as in “Sisters Waiting for Train,” where the experience of waiting, of suspension in unstructured time, is conveyed by the maze of paint clouds that encroach on their bodies. In “Sunday Morning:Phoebe,” the clouds of background and foreground color become the palpable world of sleep. And then, returning to Brian and Aggi in their bed, Brian’s face does the impossible, capturing neither a posing model nor the absence of life, but the unique and unmistakable presence of sleep.

Pamela Beach has said that she paints from states of gratitude and sorrow—the former presumably for the blessings of which her life is full, the latter for life’s imperfections. She says she must invest herself in this way because otherwise, her art would include only what her hands can do. Her conscious desire is to get the magic that is naturally present in us as children back in her adult painting. It remains only to point out that what she has done and continues to do with that creative power is the product not only of where she began, but of the lifetime of hard work she brought to it, and continues to regularly, and energetically apply.

Pamela Beach, “Magic Acorn Compass”

You Be the Lion I’ll Be the Bear, Gittins Gallery, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, through April 3.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.