Luanne Rice... artist review

STEVEN BECK
by Luanne Rice

We met when we were young.

We loved boats, the sea, and the way the Connecticut River looked at night: moving black water, touched with silver when the stars were out. We loved the river even more in fog, when the green light at the end of his grandmother’s dock glowed softly and made us think of Gatsby looking across the water for Daisy.

By day, the river was wildly alive. Who knew there were so many shades of blue? Blue hardened by sunlight, paradoxically softened by gray reflections of granite cliffs. Blue against a red hull; beneath a white lighthouse. And green: the marshes, acres of Lyme farmland sloping down to the muddy banks, the green can buoy marking the river’s bend at Brockway Ferry Road. We would go sailing—reckless, in any weather—into the Sound, out to Block Island. We went frostbiting, sailing a 14’ Blue Jay through snow and ice in winter, with the white steeples and black-shuttered sea captain’s houses of Essex rising behind us. In summer we took slow, lazy sails home at sunset, with the crescent moon cradling Venus in the gold-rose western sky and the violet Sound splashing silver against our hull. Holding the tiller, salt spray in his eyes, Steven would be painting. Steven always paints. It’s how he sees the world, how he lives his life. He lives in places of heartbreaking salt-water beauty, and he paints while he sails, while he fishes. Bluefishing off Old Lyme, bonefishing in Biscayne Bay. It has always been this way, for as long as I have known him.

I’m not an artist; I don’t know how the process works. It has always seemed magical, alchemistic to me. I realize that he stretches the canvases and mixes his paints in his studio. Sometimes he works there, other times with his easel set up in the marsh or on the porch. But I know that when we used to sail, used to fish, Steven would be taking it all in—the colors, the layers of cloud and sky, the green spartina, and, though planning to paint it later, would somehow already have started to paint it then. The piercing blue sky, the floury white sand, the mysterious horizon, the red bell buoy tilting with the tide, the green light at the end of his grandmother’s dock, whatever we were seeing: all would appear in one of Steven’s next canvases.

Are you ready? This is true: the wind would be in the painting, too. The smell of the sea blowing across the sand flats would be in the painting. The sounds of the bell buoy tolling, the waves splashing, the passing tug’s engines throbbing…all would be in Steven’s painting.

And somehow—this is the part I find most mysterious and amazing—Steven’s love would be on the canvas. His endless, bottomless love for all the places he has lived would show in his paintings. It was as if he had internalized everything—all the questions and beauty and losses, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock—and put them down on his canvases. Wonder, sorrow, joy, loneliness, yearning, desire: I see all these unseeable things in Steven’s art.

Our favorite book, when we were young, was Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. It is about a man, Thomas Hudson, who lives alone on an island and paints. He lives and breathes the sea, the fine sand, the palm trees, the big fish that sweep along the shore at night. He has sons, and it is his great love for them that brings meaning to his life, that surpasses even his identity as an artist. Now, all these years later, I see in Steven Beck so much of Hemingway’s fictional artist we once admired so greatly that we could quote passages about his life at length. Steven has moved south, to the latitudes Thomas Hudson called home. Instead of the New England shoreline, he now gazes out upon palmettos and turquoise bays, a river of grass. He has a son he adores.

But in spite of all the changes, all the moving away and ahead, one thing has stayed the same, truer than ever: Steven Beck paints as he lives. With love, joy, and ease of sailing a small white sailboat around a jutting headland on a bright summer day.