Paul Beattie

Paul Beattie (1924–1988) was an American artist.

His parents divorced in 1928; with his mother's marriage in 1930 to Ross William Beattie, young Paul was adopted by his stepfather and took the surname Beattie.

As a teenager he was enthralled by learning to draw, often sketching comic book panels, wildlife, and cowboy-showdown scenes.

He was part of the New York art scene in the late 1940s through the early 1950s, and also participated as an artist, light show innovator, and filmmaker in the early West Coast Beat movement during the 1950s and 1960s.

After a brief stint in the US Naval Reserve, from 1945 to 1947 he attended the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, where he was influenced by the works of the Impressionists, the Fauves, and the German Expressionists.

Soon after, Beattie moved to New York City, where he painted and showed his work.

In this new environment, he immersed himself in the American Abstract Expressionist art scene, won awards, and achieved some note as a young painter.

He later moved to California’s Bay Area, where he became a productive member of the beat revolution and was regarded for his collaborative and multidisciplinary work.

Beattie moved to Greenwich Village in New York City in 1947, where he immersed himself in the post-war modern art movement.

He was influenced by the works of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Hans Hofmann; he strove to impart a “deep-space” quality to what he called a “Pollockian surface-patterned tracery” in his paintings.

In 1948, Beattie received an award in an international art competition sponsored by the Philip Rosenthal-Brooklyn Museum Art School and RoKo Gallery.

He also exhibited at the Jacques Seligmann Galleries in 1949, and participated in a group show titled Fourteen Under Thirty-six: An Exhibition of Paintings at the Studio 35 gallery along with Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Harry Jackson, Al Leslie and others in 1950.

After his first marriage to Elaine Dickinson ended, Beattie met and married Dee Dunstan in New York in 1952.

They lived in a cold-water loft in the Bowery in NY, where Beattie drove a taxi and cooked in a restaurant to make ends meet, while pursuing his art career.

Beattie’s New York career culminated in a one-man show at Hansa Gallery in 1954.

Despite early artistic success, Beattie left the New York art scene and in 1954, he moved his family to San Francisco, where he became a journeyman carpenter and continued to make art.

As part of the San Francisco Bay area Beat revolution, Beattie explored other art forms in addition to drawing and painting.

Working in San Francisco, Sausalito, Larkspur, and Berkeley, he socialized and collaborated in various mediums with George Herms, Arthur Richer, Wallace Berman, Larry and Patti Jordan, Bill Spencer, Warner Jepson, Ruth Weiss, and Jay DeFeo.

During this period, Beattie experimented with collage, making constructions, press works and the written word, light shows, photography, and film-making.

Over the next decade, about a dozen of his art films were distributed by the New York Filmmakers Cooperative and Canyon Cinema in California, and screened throughout the United States and Europe.

In 1954, they moved from New York to San Francisco with their young family.

Beattie also exhibited his art in several Beat era San Francisco galleries, including the East and West Gallery and The "6" Gallery in 1955,; the New Mission in 1962; and the Batman Gallery in 1963 and 1964.

After ten years in the San Francisco Bay Area, Beattie desired a more serene working environment.

In late 1963, the Beattie family moved to Sonoma County.

He continued to expand upon his earlier work in drawing and painting, endeavoring to define himself as something beyond an "Abstract Expressionist."

During this period, Beattie again collaborated with fellow Beat artists Arthur Richer and George Herms, making films and creating “Dadaesque” combinations of poetry and graphics that were printed on a small hand letterpress, and distributed under the M-C Press label.

In 1963, the Beattie family moved northward to Sonoma County, California, to find a natural approach to living by raising chickens, goats, vegetables, fruit, as well as their five children.

Beattie also taught landscape composition and watercolor painting for six years at Santa Rosa Junior College (1974-1980).

In 1975, Beattie was invited to be part of the exhibition Collage and Assemblage in Southern California at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LICA).

For the next two decades, Beattie continued to exhibit in San Francisco and Los Angeles, while he worked on receiving his M.A. in Studio Art (University of California, Berkeley, 1976).

He also exhibited works several times at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), starting in 1976 as a part of a show titled Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era.

In 1980, Beattie had a large solo show, Paul Beattie: Paintings and Drawings, and then eventually was also part of SFMOMA’s The 50th Anniversary exhibition (1984–1985)

By the 1980s, Beattie began to see himself less as an “abstract expressionist” and more as an “abstract realist.” He continued to search for imagery which would lend itself to his preference for open brushwork, the sketch-like qualities in drawing, and the use of color to create structure.

This eventually led him toward the use of cloud- and sky-oriented subjects.

This form evolved from landscapes and horizon lines into “atmospheric decks” and their extensions.

This helped to satisfy his interest in “bringing together the qualities of a completely abstract painting experience and of a literal (bordering on photographic) verisimilitude.”

Thomas Albright, critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in 1980 that Paul Beattie’s paintings “…explore cosmological phenomena, but they simultaneously focus more intently on the various points at which these phenomena intersect with art-historical elements.

Thus there are stains and patches of irregularly daubed and dappled color that suggest not only clouds and nebulas but the amorphous Impressionist surfaces of late Monet...there are lines and rods of color that imply not only the kinetic movement of magnetic fields, but the fractured geometry of early Mondrian."

He continued to produce and show his work in northern California for several decades until his death in 1988.

Beattie was born in Bay City, Michigan to George Wheeler Thurston and Opal (nee Harrington) Thurston.