About the work of Mark Beebe
:"Nice sympathetic work on Kerouac…"
Poet Allen Ginsberg, commenting on "Grace and Anguish Comics" 7/28/1989
"Your work is fabulous! Visions of Poe and Kerouac is a beautiful, moving piece of self-introspection and true reportage. I’ve never seen anything like it."
Poet, Author, NPR Commentator Andrei Codrescu, March 29, 1991
" In Bloomington artist Mark Beebe’s tender acrylic paintings of amorphous and evolving forms, a sense of wonder is present. A practicing Buddhist, Beebe’s three 48-inch-square works emit a lyrical sense of changing and intertwined shapes that suggest skeletal animal structures, botanical growth or human bones and tissue. These complex paintings are mysterious and beautiful."
Lydia Finkelstein, Bloomington Hoosier Times , September 2001
"The organic abstractions of Mark Beebe have a glossy album cover feel. Still, they are so proficient within their own terms, and their basic intuition, the divinity of organic life, so sound, that the paintings can be quite effective. Beebe paints in layers of acrylic on wood panels, in shapes that look like the looping, linked vessels of the circulatory system, only glowing. This radiance conveys the sense of the miraculous, while the shapes seem to depict the burgeoning of life at the cellular level. In Spring his shapes look like meiotic germ cells or pollen spores, all encased in viscid membranes. Interestingly, Beebe’s paintings are among the few really emotional works in the show, which tends more towards the cerebral."
Tom Rhea, Bloomington Independent, September 27, 2001, in review of Divine show at School of Fine Arts Gallery
"I think of the fluid, natural, beautiful paintings I’ve seen today, Mark Beebe’s New Paintings at the Bellevue Gallery. Mark calls this work variations on "biomorphic surrealism", these organic, flowing complexions which are simultaneously complicated then also simple and direct and beautifully of Life."
Deneise Self, Bloomington Voice, June 25, 1998
"Art is a religious experience for Mark Beebe. It is a shadow, a means, a holy process…a meditation. Influenced by the surrealists of the 1930’s – the German painter Max Ernst, and more notably, the Chilean artist Matta, whose work has a narrative quality of free-flowing forms.
The Bellevue Gallery and Beebe…do it with style, passion and conviction! This is excellent art, folks…the gallery itself has seen better days. But there, in the midst of tempered neglect, lies the product of an artistic soul that is vital, compelling, swirling, and – yes! –even majestic."Charles P. Sutphin, Bloomington Voice, March 1993
"Beebe says he has multiple lives and he needs all of them: they balance each other in unexpected reversals. The so-called "comics" are introspective and brooding, the "high art" paintings engage the popular culture of science fiction. Perhaps it makes contradictory sense then, that Beebe is the son of a scholar of Poe and Joyce, yet almost entirely "self taught" as an artist. Working from his own imagination and experience, he draws from 60's drug culture, the tradition of biomorphic surrealism, and Buddhist revelations of the natural order. Part observation and part fantasy, his work is based, like the music he admires, on both discipline and improvisation, meditation and spontaneity. Like music, and like narrative, there is a quality of personal journey in Beebe's work, borne out in his recent resolve to take his work to a larger audience. I am convinced that this path is good; I encourage you to explore it with him."
Kathleen A. Foster, Curator of American Art, Philadelphia Art Museum
"Now Beebe has connected with, and created, his own style of painting, a style that comes from deep within the artist...It is clear, in Beebe's painting, that his is a search for a universal truth that his images may, or may not, ultimately reveal."
Lydia Finkelstein, Bloomington Herald-Times, April 27, 2003
For prices and availability of original paintings, and for further information on original books and comics, contact:
Mark Beebe
106 Club House Drive
Bloomington, Indiana 47404
812-335-1884
