Don Scott Macdonald and Jeffrey Beauchamp, Cloud Songs, Pamela Walsh Gallery
Jeffrey Beauchamp
Spicy Rumors of a Deluge, 2025
Oil on canvas
36 in x 60 in
By Hugh Leeman
Don Scott Macdonald and Jeffrey Beauchamp's exhibition, Cloud Songs at Pamela Walsh Gallery, pairs two artists equally talented as musicians and painters who look through differing lenses in their exploration of the skyspace above. Their expansive landscape paintings' panoramic vistas, depicted largely from imagination, create compelling portraits of clouds that result in foundational convergence, yet through divergent creative processes and unique personalities, produce fundamentally distinct emotional atmospheres.
Don Scott Macdonald
Late, 2025
Oil and alkyd on canvas
36 in x 36 in
Don Scott Macdonald returned to painting after a music studio rehearsal accident led to what he describes as "An 80% hearing loss [that] has a big influence on my paintings." Amidst the loss of hearing and a change in life direction, the artist's creativity emerges as a light between the dark of cloud's shadow. His process evolves like an ongoing exchange between a master and apprentice in an atelier. Beginning with a pencil sketch of his imagined landscape, he later uses a Sharpie marker, perhaps pulling from his career as an art director, to add notes guiding his process through labeling the painting's portions with color labels and what forms he will change. After enlarging the work, the thinning of oil paint begins a methodical painting process with some 30-40 layers of glaze, creating gradient tonal shifts at times entirely eliminating edges, resulting in an atmospheric quality he compares to his music.
Jeffrey Beauchamp
Rest On the Flight to Egypt, 2025
Oil on canvas
30 in x 30 in
Jeffrey Beauchamp's process is a playful experiment where accident can become an artwork's joyful essence. He will paint with such a broad spectrum of colors on his palette that he laughs about the later challenge in its required cleaning. In using so many colors, he will hold multiple brushes between the fingers in his non-dominant hand, a torso twist between palette and painting seemingly capable of causing smears of pigment to erupt like jazz music riffing off of rolling hills. The artist's excited ad-libbing counters deliberate compositional constructions of place and color that the painter speaks of as starting with muted tones to soften the vibrant, saturated color he will add as the artwork evolves.
(L) Don Scott Macdonald , Flash Light, 2025, Oil and alkyd on canvas, 36 in x 36 in(R) Jeffrey Beauchamp, 16th Century View of Sesame Street, 2025, Oil on canvas, 30 in x 40 in
Birds and bodies nestle within Beauchamp's improvisational brushwork that liberates his technical acumen from the academy's unwritten rulebook. Entire hillsides emerge from psychedelic ribbons coiling around clouds. Contrasting such light-hearted energy, Macdonald's landscapes appear as if Mark Rothko inspired the light and clouds of the sky to perform for the admiration of the color field painter's eyes. Although Macdonald's artworks in Cloud Songs don't depict the birds or bodies of Beauchamp's paintings, trees, stones, and even a rushing river run through his layered glaze's compositions. Nature's forms are solid yet blurred, recalling Gerhard Richter's brushwork and a sense that we are not in a physical place so much as a passing state of the painter's mind.
Don Scott Macdonald
Westbound, 2021
Oil and alkyd on canvas
30 in x 30 in
Macdonald's paintings feel like sublime memories capable of transmitting painting's ability to speak where photos falter. In Westbound, golden yellow transitions into its opposite, first passing through orange and reds, finally resting in purple above a body of water. A blurred central tree overlooks the land, sitting beneath a cloud form that graduates through tones of purple so soft they heighten the beauty of the canvas's complementary colors, while adding to an air of mystery that Macdonald has mastered through spaces that exist at the edge of earth's archive.
Don Scott Macdonald
Unfurling, 2025
Oil and alkyd on canvas
30 in x 30 in
At times, Macdonald creates sky-scapes that he speaks of as being inspired by the attributes of someone he knows, one honoring the brilliance of a girlfriend who died too young, another a dear friend who is never far. In each, the conditions are set by condensed floating masses of water filtering the color of light reaching our eyes. The composite of such ethereal elements allows us to leave meaning behind amidst the emotional features found in Unfurling, where a trail cuts through the brush, mirroring the open space between the vapor-condensed, ephemeral forms above. Their separation paves the way for the sky to remind us that the passage of time is like vision itself, shifting with the heavens' tones.
Jeffrey Beauchamp
Pavarotti Sings the ABC Song In His Sleep, 2025
Oil on canvas
36 in x 60 in
Beauchamp's sense of humor and beauty merge through titles and a playground of candy colored abstract forms, lightheartedly chuckling with the governors of celestial rhythm. Pavarotti Sings the ABC Song in His Sleep moves between stunning and silly, showing us the joy in painting multi-lined land masses that look as if Wayne Thiebaud's cakes became linear, organized streaks of rainbow icing awaiting the nourishment of a psychotropic rain sure to emerge from forms at the intersection of musical notes and ancient Mesoamerican speech/song scrolls. Somewhere deep in the distance, a yellow-green glow highlights the artist's humor, who laughingly describes the sound of his paintings as "Sesame Street all the way, baby." Later, he adds that Bach is a big inspiration because the composer "is sort of the Jim Henson of classical music."
Jeffrey Beauchamp
Rosemary Unleashes the Nerf Jihad, 2007
Oil on canvas
84 in x 60 in
In Rosemary Unleashed the Nerf Jihad, an expressionistic gestural landscape evokes elements of a Joan Mitchell masterwork, spreading across an expanse at once convincing and absurd. Within the rainbow gestured brushwork, women sleep in the grass. In the distance, someone walks a puffball of a dog in a red raincoat, backdropped by a mysterious structure and a wisp of land, all of which seems to suggest the sleeping women here, like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, are amidst dreams beneath a textured sky that could take a turn and become its own landscape. Skillfully, Beauchamp allows us, like Lewis Carroll, to explore fantasy and relinquish control, so that the profundity of creativity can explore nature and the construction of reality.
(L) Don Scott Macdonald , Big Pinks Brief Moment, 2025, Oil and alkyd on canvas, 36 in x 36 in, (R) Jeffrey Beauchamp, Moonrise Over Iroshizuku Park, 2024, Oil on canvas, 36 in x 48 in
Through both painters' uniquely differing landscapes, Cloud Songs performs in magical notes, highlighting beautiful terrain easily overlooked under the 21st century's deluge. From Beauchamp's Dr. Seussian landscapes to Macdonald's color field cloud forms hovering at the periphery of mirage, the exhibition's visual spectrum pushes viewers into the ether of imagination, celebrating the artists' diversity of creativity. Macdonald's paintings harmonize a language of memory, while Beauchamp's works smile as they sing in the accent of dreams, both playing beautiful songs recorded through the musical score of vast oil paintings. Don Scott Macdonald and Jeffrey Beauchamp's panoramas evolve at the edge of contrasting trails, allowing us to explore internal space manifest as clouds of thought and land masses of moments just beyond the present.
Reference:
“‘Cloud Songs’ Artist Talk With Don Scott Macdonald and Jeffrey Beauchamp.” Pamela Walsh Gallery, www.pamelawalshgallery.com/video/17.
