"My current work is primarily in earthenware clay, which I fire multiple times to achieve my desired surface. The pieces are handbuilt, although sometimes I also add thrown elements. My use of color and line is instinctive; my reasoning concerning choice is obscure. Things work best for me when I’m able to liberate myself of thought and just feel what I’m trying to express. Clay gives me a blank canvas and infinite challenges that I look forward to solving every day." - Rebecca Zweibel
Humans depend upon the concept of cause and effect to simplify an incredibly complex universe, predict the future and to build meaning in the face of nature’s “chaotic” ambivalence. With his newest work, Nathan Beard seeks a deeper understanding of how this system molds our experiences into a generally seamless chronology and aids in the creation, or adoption, of world views. Simultaneously, he also probes the concept’s main weakness: that it limits a more thorough comprehension of the intricate relationships between matter, space, energy and time at scales approaching the infinite.
Nathan Beard’s paintings provide a meditative pause in which viewers can dwell upon the potential congruity between human agency, biological and terrestrial processes, and cosmological forces. One is encouraged to evaluate the importance of their choices and the effect they have not only upon the present, but also upon the future and the past. They are asked to consider exactly what type of self-preservation they summon when confronted with daily challenges or major life events. Most importantly, viewers are invited to reestablish their own relationship to cause and effect in the face of the unpredictable, unknowable and vast.
Exit Music is played at the end of a performance or movie while the audience is departing, signaling both the end of the imaginary world they were privy to and their sobering reemergence into daily life. Nathan was drawn to this as a metaphor for transition and the complicated feelings that the “end” conjures.
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Materially, Nathan uses masking tape as a dry resist and it serves as a metaphor for conscious deliberation or will. The serpentine gesture is meant to evoke the march of time and infinity, and is a visual metaphor for the energies at work forming and reforming all we see and experience. Nathan’s paintings are personal meditations upon interconnectedness, the power derived through transformation and the nature of consciousness.
Nathan was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Colorado State University in 2001 and then worked in galleries and as an Art Consultant in Denver, CO for seven years. He grew up on a dairy farm in western New York. Prior to his university studies, Nathan lived in Egypt for one year as an exchange student and, upon his return, worked as a cowboy in Wyoming for two years. Nathan maintains a studio in St. Petersburg, FL where he lives with his wife and daughter.