Louisiana’s Resident Painter, Naturalist, Author and Conservationist

Cover Artist Alex Beard

by Cayman Clevenger

WHISKEY, A KEEN AND SPRIGHTLY yellow lab, is using a sisal rug to scratch her back. She is the first and most enthusiastic greeter you will meet at Alex Beard’s light-filled Magazine Street Studio and Gallery. Sitting next to Whiskey under the branches of papier-mâché trees, with an audience of brilliantly colored, painted birds and a life-size painting of a gazelle facing off with a lion, Beard discussed his life, travels, family, and how they influenced his art.

Beard has become a fixture of the art scene in Louisiana, painting wildlife, birds, elephants, fish, swamps, foliage and the beauty of the natural world. He has cultivated his own style that he coined “abstract naturalism.” Beard’s style pays homage to John James Audubon, Walter Inglis Anderson, and those great wildlife artists that came before him, but it is also distinctively his own.

Beard’s work is whimsical, visually rich and features bright colors. Lively greens and blues are juxtaposed with brown backgrounds that feel as though they were cut from a safari tent. His work is alive with shapes, motion and geometry, with layers of coloring and a level of precision and and intention best described as mathematical.

His works follow complex formulas, taking into account the divine proportion, also known as the golden ratio, with each shape and subject conforming to a principle used by great artists from the ancient Greeks to Leonardo da Vinci and the prominent Renaissance painters.

Beard takes this mathematical and scientific approach to painting animal anatomy and adds a childlike whimsy while exuding a quiet sophistication. From the cacophony of color and shapes emerges the beauty of nature, with flora and fauna conjured from within the shapes and colors as if they had always been there.

The son of a magazine-editor mother and a political consultant/philanthropist father, Beard grew up in Manhattan. The person most responsible for Beard’s life trajectory and his love of Africa, wildlife and the natural world crashed on the couch of his parents’ New York apartment.

“My uncle Peter [Beard,] who wrote ‘The End “Our house was my uncle’s only mailing address for a time, so we would get letters from Charlie Manson because Peter had interviewed him once with Truman Capote in the 1970s, and they just kind of hit it off,” Beard said.

Beard recalls a bevy of other interesting house guests, though not all as famous. “The guy who was a bush pilot who crashed his plane and 70 percent of his body was burned; he walked into our living room one day, and he was a very interesting person to a first grader,” he said.

Beard’s exposure to an indelible cast of characters and brushes with influential artistic and cultural figures of the 20th century shaped his trajectory. “Having been exposed to these very creative and successful people, it made sense to me that life as an of the Game,’ was an artist and photographer who lived in Africa for a long time,” he said. “And when he wasn’t in Africa when I was growing up, he lived on our sofa in Manhattan. He would move in for six or eight months at a time, and his whole world would move into mine.”

Growing up, Beard also had audiences with Jackie Onassis, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and Mick Jagger.

These titans of popular culture welcomed into the Beards’ home were only some of many interesting things to cross the threshold. Beard’s family often received letters from the infamous Charlie Manson. artist was a life that I could lead and a life that I could aspire towards,” Beard said.

Among the family’s famous guests, Andy Warhol left one of the biggest impressions. Beard remembers the father of Pop Art as a brilliant artist and a “master manipulator.”

Beard recounts a scheme he watched Warhol play out time and time again with Truman Capote: “They would meet these rich members of society and afterward Truman would call them and say ‘Andy just loves you, he is so enamored by you, and he really wants to paint your portrait, but he is just too shy to ask.’ So, these wealthy people of society would call and say to Andy ‘I would like you to paint my portrait,’ to which Andy would say ‘Of course, I would love to; that will be fifty grand!’ They would line up weeks of sittings in Paris, London, wherever they traveled.”

Warhol also taught Beard valuable lessons: to talk less and listen more. “Andy would introduce himself and then just look intently at the other people sitting next to him at the table. When they would start talking, he would respond with ‘Oh, yes,’ listening intently as they spoke about themselves.

“At the end of the dinner, Andy [Warhol] would not have said more than two words, and his dinner partner would have told him their entire life story, and so then he knew everything about you. And you didn’t know anything more about him than when the dinner had started.”

Despite this, the dinner guests were always enamored by Andy Warhol. At the end of the dinner, Beard distinctly recalls one guest telling his mother, “I just loved sitting with [Warhol]; he is such an interesting man!”

Beard’s childhood was not all dinner tables and fancy guests. He was interested in the natural world from a very early age, and as a teenager, he regularly traveled to Africa with his Uncle Peter. His parents believed that travel was the best education, and having traveled to nearly every corner of the globe, Beard seems to possess an almost restless, nomadic disposition.

Indeed, Beard’s artistic journey is as unique as the exotic and far-flung places he has traveled, and his artistic style is informed by travel, wildlife, conservation and the universe’s movement.

Beard’s connection to New Orleans began when he spent a year at Tulane University, indulging in the city’s excesses. He later transferred to Tufts University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in History. Knowing that art was his future, Beard then studied painting and drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

After college, Beard spent several months in India. The trip proved integral to the formation of his artistic style.

“I was in India for half a year writing, taking photographs, and doing work in quill pen and ink in a travel journal. I left that journal on the top of a taxi, had my camera stolen on a train, and suddenly, I did not have any art supplies,” Beard said. “All the work I had done over the course of four months was gone.”

Rather than bemoaning the loss of his irreplaceable artistic toil, Beard pushed onward. “I was in Calcutta recovering from dengue fever at a place called the Tollygunge Club, which was the last vestiges of an old ex-pat English gentleman’s club. I decided to find an art supply store to purchase some materials to start anew.

“At the time, there were mass protests in the streets, and I emerged from that cacophony into this cobweb-laden, 19th-century art supply store that smelled like linseed oil and the orange scent of aged turpentine. I bought my first real supplies of oil paint and medium and set about my journey tracking tigers in the wild for a magazine in New York,” Beard said.

The last leg of his trip to India was spent at the southern tip of the country in a small fishing village free from distractions and where he spent the remainder of his trip painting. The loss of his comfortable artistic mediums and his reliance on paint opened a whole new universe.

After India, Beard considered accompanying an author on a horseback journey across Persia while illustrating the author’s travelogue. But the siren song of New Orleans beckoned. As fate would have it, Jimmy Coleman, whose family owned the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, discovered Beard’s art, purchased a few pieces and convinced him to continue his formal training in New Orleans.

Influenced by his childhood houseguests, education and travels, Beard’s artwork is at once whimsical and alive with movement and color while also reflecting the beauty of the natural world without the benefit of realism.

“In my early years, I was something between a sycophant and an apprentice to my Uncle Peter, who was taking photographs and documenting wildlife. I found my voice in a different part of the world, painting different subject matter, and I knew I was more interested in the painting medium than I would ever be in photography.

“In fact, when I go on safari in Africa now, I do not even bring a camera,” Beard said. “When you draw an elephant, it doesn’t help you to see a photograph. You have to go and see them in the wild and see how they move. How the leg structure works and how they hold themselves can relate that to other things you see. As a result, when you find the suggestion of that movement in the gestures that I begin with it is easy to pull that out and have that be recognizable as that thing without it being cartoon or caricature,” he said.

Beard is part of a growing artistic movement once called action work and now referred to as gestural painting. Beard explains the process: “Gestural work begins with a gesture, and everything is derived from that.”

His paintings could also be described as neo-Audubon, where abstract expressionism and naturalism come together in a way that documents not only the beauty of nature but the intrinsic movement in the otherwise inanimate medium of oil on canvas.

“Abstract expressionists were the culmination of hundreds of years of deconstructing that which was photorealistic, even if imagined, into its essence of color and movement and light. So you go from Fragonard to Pollock. That is quite a progression of steps to get you from romanticism to Pollock’s removing his hand as interference to get the intrinsic movement of the way that the universe works by splashing paint instead of interfering with a brush stroke. Pollock is not just splatter painting; his work is hands-free gestural painting. Abstract expressionism is the removal of that which is real to find its essence. I start from that point and then bring the life back out,” he said.

Beard describes his process of extracting shapes, movement, and color from the simple and fundamental spirals he quickly sketches out beneath his complex paintings as “lying on your back in the grass looking at the clouds and looking for things that are recognizable.”

Beard believes in the interconnectedness of all things and all people, and he brings this fundamental truth to his work: “I don’t think you need to know an answer as to whether or not there is a god if you can recognize that there is a connection between multiple otherwise seemingly disparate things. The spiral, the same thing that is present in the seashell is present in the arms of the galaxy, and the shape of a hurricane, and when you grid out a rectangle to find the divine proportion, that says to me that there is a greater order to the universe in which we exist. I then apply those fundamental truths to natural subjects.”

A great deal of what gives his work dynamism is that Beard is a true wildlife enthusiast who creates puzzles with each new piece of art for himself to solve. “Because I am interested in nature and my subject matter is naturalist, my pathway to a visual conversation about the intrinsic way in nature that things move, color, and light, comes from things like the divine proportion and finding, through experience and my own surroundings, universal truths like the spiral.”

Beard’s artwork is a captivating, revelatory and celebratory look at the splendor of the natural world, with an eye toward preservation, conservation and bringing awareness to the natural beauty surrounding us.

An appreciation for animals and the environments in which they live goes far beyond just the inspiration it provides Beard for his artwork. Because of his connection and respect for nature, he created The Watering Hole Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to saving endangered wildlife and preserving Earth’s remaining wilderness. Its mission is to identify and fund initiatives that preserve natural environments and their inhabitants, both locally and abroad. The Watering Hole Foundation is partially supported by sales of his artwork.

Beard was also recently honored as the keynote artist at the New Orleans Museum of Art’s Art in Bloom, creating the official image of the evening’s gala. This year, Beard served as artist in residence at the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans and hosted a solo show titled “Alex Beard: From Scratch,” at the Reynolds Ryan Art Museum.

For more information about The Watering Hole Foundation or to purchase Beard’s artwork, stop by Beard’s studio located at 3926 Magazine Street or visit AlexBeardStudio.com.