SEATTLE, WASHINGTON.- The Frye Art Museum presents "Painting on the Edge: The Art of William Beckman," on view through October 27, 2002. Beckman paints himself, loved-ones, and the land he has lived upon. The subjects, whether his mother or his lover, are bared frontally to the viewer with gripping details, without embellishment. Over months, or even a year, Beckman uses a unique method. He applies paint to create his figurative or landscape paintings, then shaves off layers from the surface with a razor, repainting and polishing the planes to create a lustrous surface that is not varnished, to achieve glowing and absorbing images.



Trained as an engineering draftsman, Beckman is one of the most intelligent realist painters today. His realism is stripped of sentiment, his unidealized portraits scrupulously rendered and his expansive tracts of farmland theatrically scaled. Each painting is epic in significance and matter-of-fact at the same time.



A major museum retrospective tour of Beckman’s work is scheduled to tour the United States next year. His work is featured in public collections internationally, including The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, The Museum Moderne Kunst in Vienna, Austria, The Flint Institute of Arts, in Detroit, MI, The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, The Art Institute of Chicago in IL, The Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greenville, SC, The Milwaukee Art Museum in WI, and The University of North Carolina in Charlotte.