In Beach’s work, the act of reading becomes a threshold—where children enter fully into imagined worlds before distraction pulls them away.

Several years ago, when so many of our artists and their galleries were devoted to sounding the alarm on behalf of the environment, and particularly the disappearing Great Salt Lake, Pamela Beach had her own perspective, literally, on the matter. From the front porch of the home where she and her husband raised six children, she found she could look down and see places in the lake’s eastern bays where there was no water at all, and the drying bed was clearly visible. She joined that fight with the skills of a landscape artist.

However, there was another threat to her friends and family that concerned her more directly. This was the impact of computers in general, and specifically social media, on the lives of seemingly everyone. She realized that the computer, supposedly a boon to creativity, was playing a completely contrary role in those lives, so that many of us—and especially our children, who may spend as much as nine hours a day in front of screens—were being deprived of the solitude and focus on personal space, time, and especially the development of their imaginations, so important to individuality.

Beach’s rendition of familiar stories at David Ericson.

Instead of being a useful tool or a valuable asset to life, computers, and the social media they primarily support, have come to dominate and shape the lives of a majority of those who encounter them encounter it in the vulnerable years when they should rather be solidifying the skillful use of their imaginations. Children, Beach learned from her own experience watching her children grow up socializing with each other in the form of play, have a unique inability to distinguish their games from reality. While they are playing, what they imagine is as good as real. In time, they will lose that magic power, and will come to know what they invent to be their own creations, but they will then be able to recall and count on the recollected experience of being truly in the moment, rather than always distracted by media voices and scenes from elsewhere.

In those years, Beach observed, celebrated, and even consecrated the fully lived lives of her children through domestic art-making, which she shared with her six kids and their friends, so that she realized that adult creativity is necessarily rooted in that of childhood. Eventually, as her kids became more independent, she was able to return to school and earn her MFA at the University of Utah. While she continues to exploit her access to the rich, spontaneous creativity they are fortunate—indeed, blessed—to enjoy,—to enjoy, she has also asked them to help her by occasionally posing as characters from their own vivid versions of some of the familiar canon of stories that over the years have proven themselves helpful starting places for the stories on which children learn to pattern their own. Instead of quoting, for example, derivative commercial versions riddled with adult mockery and sarcasm that take the viewers out of any chance to believe in their fantasies, her kids have their own versions, often complete with costumes they assemble themselves and familiar locations in nature that they know and can adapt their stories to.

“Little Red Riding Hood,” 48×30 in.

“I live every day on the bedrock of my own childhood,” says this paragon of artistic creativity, who then asks what happens when today’s youngsters aren’t given the chance to even have childhoods: when they spend so much of their days in front of digital screens that provide them a shallow and alien basis on which to grow. And so, while she continues to paint other, less formal examples of children at play in their own lives, she has recently focused on these shared templates that encourage children who might otherwise never feel permitted to even be children to let their imaginations run wild. These works at David Ericson’s gallery constitute collaborations between Pamela Beach and, on the one hand, the folk geniuses of the past who gave us stories that endure, which have always been meant to teach invaluable skills to our children, and on the other hand, those very children, who, like the seriously playful, youthful inventors they are learn vital skills by creating their own versions of those tales.

Pamela Beach, David Ericson Fine Art, Salt Lake City, through May 11.

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.