ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 30, 1996 TAG: 9601300056
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
When Jack Beal answers the door, restraining a portly Airedale with one hand and beckoning a visitor inside with the other, he seems to occupy the entire doorframe.
He's big, though not as big as he used to be. Once 6 feet 4 inches tall, the 64-year-old Richmond-born artist has lost a couple of inches (to age, he figures) in recent years.
Currently living with his wife on the campus of Hollins College, he shuffles around their duplex in a pair of Velcro strap-on running shoes, brown slacks and a rumpled blue sweatshirt. He nestles his half-moon glasses on top of his head, among wisps of thinning gray hair.
He looks comfortable. He looks his age. He looks like he's been thinking hard about something. Above all, he looks at home.
Which may be surprising, considering that he and his wife - noted watercolorist Sondra Freckelton - and Scooter the Airedale had arrived from their New York farmhouse and unpacked their brushes and easels only a few days before.
But this little apartment on a wooded lane on campus will be home for Beal and Freckelton for the next few months. For the third time in four years, the two painters are artists-in-residence at the college.
In connection with his latest visit, some of Beal's paintings have also found a temporary home in Roanoke. An exhibit of nearly 20 works opened Jan. 19 at the Art Museum of Western Virginia. The show, which also includes works by Freckelton and the Hollins College art faculty, will be up until March 25.
``Coming to Hollins is one of the best things that ever happened to us,'' Beal says. And that means something coming from Beal and Freckelton.
At 22, Freckelton was already showing her work in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Beal had his first solo show in 1965, and his resume lists group exhibits all over the country, including the renowned Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1992, Hudson Hill press published ``Jack Beal,'' a book of his life's work.
Sitting at the dining room table, drinking coffee and later Diet Dr Pepper, Beal seemed to fill up the whole room. But it's not just his stature. It's his ideas.
Beal is known in the art world for his mission-like fervor in preaching traditional values in art. In the early 1960s, he broke from the prevailing currents of abstract art - or, as he puts it, went beyond abstraction - and set out to paint pictures that were truly accessible to their viewers.
He says art ran amok with society's rejection of Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, who ``sold one painting between them.'' Since then, Beal argues, artists have left the audience out of most considerations. They make art for themselves.
Beal's mission is to counter all that, to make art with the viewer in mind.
``It only makes sense that we make art for the people around us,'' he said, ``because they make things for us, like food, electricity, clothes.''
For Beal, art and life are pretty much the same pursuit.
``I want to make my art like the best of life, and my life like the best of art,'' he says.
His dream is to ``make a painting so real I can walk into it, and the people in it can walk out into the room.'' He grins as he says this, but if he's kidding, he's not kidding much.
``I talk to the people in the pictures,'' he confesses. ``I write them imaginary letters and get imaginary responses from them.''
There is something approaching the embraceable about the people in Beal's paintings, but it comes less from a photographic re-creation of them than from the warmth and familiarity Beal gives them. He paints only people he knows, for the most part, including the 37 people in a series of murals on the history of labor that he did for the U.S. Department of Labor.
Art has been a basic element of Beal's life almost from the start.
He had frequent earaches as a child, and his mother would distract him from the pain by getting him to draw pictures.
The son of two alcoholics, Beal spent a fair amount of his childhood in orphanages like the Richmond Home for Boys, where he says he distracted bigger boys from beating him up by drawing pictures of sports stars. Beal was so haunted by life at the boys home that years later, after it was torn down, he went back to make sure it was gone.
He was 19 and living with his mother in Norfolk when he began taking art classes at what is now Old Dominion University. He took them mostly to be with friends.
At the urging of his teacher, Regina Bartley, Beal applied to and was accepted by the Art Institute of Chicago. He says his work was so terrible back then that he still can't figure out what Bartley and the school saw in it.
He left the institute without graduating, but not without a wife. It was in Chicago that Beal met Freckelton.
One night, he was helping her with an English essay. She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. Beal says it was as if she had pressed a ``magic button.''
``I was just so smitten,'' he recalls, ``that I was determined that she accept me as her husband.''
Never mind that she was engaged to someone else. Eight weeks later, they were married.
The couple moved to New York and lived the quintessential starving-artist life, working whatever jobs they could find, living in a series of cramped flats, and making art. Freckelton, who was a sculptor back then, taught woodshop. Beal did electrical wiring for whoever needed it.
It was 1962 when he decided to abandon abstract expressionism and paint in a realist vein. A few years later, he took another big step.
``I said I was going to make big important paintings that no one could ignore.''
His wife and friends all patted him on the back and wished him luck. But less than a year later, Beal had his first one-man show at the Allan Frumkin Gallery and sold every painting in it.
That was in 1965, and he says he's been running on that same energy ever since.
He and Freckelton celebrated their 40th anniversary last summer. For 22 years, they have made their home in an old mill on a stream in rural country near Oneonta, N.Y. But they often take up residence elsewhere as visiting artists and teachers, sometimes separately, but more often together. Beal calls it the couple's ``straw hat and bamboo cane routine.''
Given the opportunity, Beal says, they would love to stay at Hollins. Hollins President Maggie O'Brien reportedly has a verbal agreement with Beal and Freckelton that they will be spring artists-in-residence indefinitely. But O'Brien has since announced her departure for St. Mary's College of Maryland, and it remains to be seen whether the unwritten agreement will stand in her absence.
That Beal wants to stay suggests how much he likes Hollins.
``Most art schools are snakepits of politics,'' he said. He says he is "actively hated" by the administration of one school in New York - and he was one of the founders.
Beal is more than welcome at Hollins, though.
``With Jack, what you see is what you get,'' observed Hollins art professor William White. ``He's not a pretentious guy. He's warm and generous and giving and interested.''
The painter just seems to fit right in at the school.
``I have appointed myself social coordinator of the art department,'' he said proudly. That amounts to periodically rounding up the art faculty and a few others to venture ``en masse'' to Mr. Su's restaurant on the Roanoke City Market.
Freckelton, dubbed the ``family cynic'' by her husband, has come to love Hollins too. She didn't always love the South, though. After her first visit below the Mason -Dixon many years ago, she refused to separate her white and colored laundry as a symbolic protest of racial segregation.
Hollins is another story, though. Beal puts it this way:
``When you turn off of Williamson Road out there, it's like coming into another universe.'' Works by Jack Beal and other Hollins College faculty members are on exhibit at the Art Museum of Western Virginia, Center in the Square, through March 25. 342-5760.
LENGTH: Long : 153 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN/Staff. 1. ``I want to make my art like theby CNBbest of life, and my life like the best of art,'' says Hollins
College artist-in-residence Jack Beal. 2. Details from Beal's
``Daffodils'' (above, 1988, 16 inches by 20 inches) and 3.
``Prudence, Avarice, Lust, Justice, Anger (The Card Game)'' (left,
1977-78, 72 inches by 78 inches). 4. Detail from Beal's
``Fortitude'' (1977, 60 inches by 54 inches).