Drawing

History

“The imagined space in Paul Beattie’s paintings and drawings brings us fleeting glimpses of eternity.

He had a knack for catching bits of truth about the universe, truths not available to most of us, then through his art conveying them to the viewer.”

Scott Lipanovich

Curator, The Doyle Collection Santa Rosa Junior College, Santa Rosa, CA

Structured Space #50, 1982, graphite on paper, 9 x 10 inches, SS-52.31

Mill Creek #68, 1979, graphite on paper, 4 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches, PR-47.18

Paul was constantly honing his drawing skills, and the range of genres in his extensive body of works on paper is diverse: portraiture, figures, landscapes, and planetary and star field subjects. He worked in various mediums including ink pen, china marker, and oil pastel, although the simple #2 graphite pencil consistently remained his tool of choice.

Paul’s decades-long interest in astronomy, the cosmos and quantum physics, combined with his observations via his hand-built telescope, directly influenced his drawing practice. He wrote:

“As a subject matter, astronomy is unique enough and compatible with my preferences as an artist. I chose this subject because its pictorial amplitude is wide and its visual qualities are many-faceted: layers, levels, strata, groupings and spacings, solids and wisps, overlaps, transitions, transparencies, and so forth.”

Paul Beattie

Turnover Region #1 (Early Galactic Formation and Dissolution), 1987, graphite on paper, 7 x 7 inches, MG-48.81

Complex Region #11, 1984, graphite on paper, 11 x 12 inches, MG-48.64

His continued interest in space and the structure of planetary atmospheres is evidenced by his participation in the 1975 Otis Sky Show and by a one-man exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art titled The Earth’s Early Atmosphere in 1976. He also had a large one-man in 1980 show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled Paul Beattie: Paintings and Drawings.

During the last few years of his life, Paul was working on what he considered to be a very special body of work – a series of 340 large graphite drawings of individual terraformed planets. He intended these to be exhibited in an ordered progression up the Rotunda staircase of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. This large graphite planet series is a culminating tribute to Paul’s artistic vision.