Michael Beck, Large Photo Realist Pop Art Watercolor Painting Children's Toys Teddy Bear Block, 1986

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Michael Beck (American, b. 1943) Watercolor painting on paper, 1986 "First Fruits", Hand signed, dated and titled along lower margins … Read more Michael Beck (American, b. 1943) Watercolor painting on paper, 1986 "First Fruits", Hand signed, dated and titled along lower margins Gallery label verso, Matted and framed under plexiglass, Dimensions: 38"h x 58"w (sight), 48"h x 67"w (frame) Provenance: Property from a Major Corporate Art Collection; Corporate Art Directions, NYC Michael Beck (b. 1943) ( American Photo Realist artist) was born in San Diego California. In 1971, he attended the California College of Arts and Crafts and was awarded the James D. Phelan Award in the Visual Arts, juried by artists Wayne Thiebaud and June Livingston. In June of 2014, he was awarded a Jackson Pollock- Lee Krasner Foundation award. Michael Beck was part of the early Photo Realist Movement in California among other contemporaries like Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham and Richard Estes and Audrey Flack. Choosing vintage childrens toys as his subject matter. Michael Beck’s artwork stands out for its distinct subjects of toys and objects from a previous era. These unique items include vintage rocking horses, toy cars, rockets, and bicycles. Toys are at once universal and highly personal, and Beck’s work taps into the shared experience of childhood with a nostalgic nod to the past. Beck’s work taps into a collective nostalgia for childhood and our idealized version of Americana. Beck positions his object singularly and isolated from any referential setting, allowing viewers to create their own narrative associations. Each piece is painted as if the toy object was placed under a heavy spotlight, creating the illusion of three dimensionality. The word Photorealism was coined by Louis K. Meisel in 1969 and appeared in print for the first time in 1970 in a Whitney Museum catalogue for the show "Twenty-two Realists." It is also sometimes labeled as Super-Realism, New Realism, Sharp Focus Realism, or Hyper-Realism. As a full-fledged art movement, Photorealism evolved from Pop Art and as a counter to Abstract Expressionism as well as Minimalist art movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States.The work depended heavily on photographs, which they often projected onto canvas allowing images to be replicated with precision and accuracy. The exactness was often aided further by the use of an airbrush, which was originally designed to retouch photographs. The movement came about within the same period and context as Conceptual art, Pop art, and Minimalism and expressed a strong interest in realism in art, over that of idealism and abstraction. The first Photorealist artists were Chuck Close, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Robert Bechtle, Audrey Flack, Denis Peterson, Lowell Nesbitt and Malcolm Morley. Each began practicing some form of Photorealism around the same time, often utilizing different modes of application and techniques, and citing different inspirations for their work. However, for the most part they all worked independent from one another. For example, Chuck Close came of age at the height of Pop art and the Andy Warhol Factory, and was based out of SoHo in lower Manhattan. And Audrey Flack, a graduate of Yale, began creating photo-based works in the early 1960s. See less