all of the day longing: Scott beck and benjamin terrell at one wall gallery

BY BENJAMIN TERRELL

Above: A painting by Scott Beck
Below: A painting by Benjamin Terrell

All of the Day Longing

​These are the days when the ice takes the trees that the fire left behind. These are also the days that if the world was a book you had been enjoying, you might now choose to put it down or turn to something streaming that promises a pleasant ending. It may feel odd then, if you are like me, to find desire as the show pony in the current barn and stable variety of fight or flight. Desire - the insatiable un-scratchable want, wheel grease of absence and unexpected byproduct of abundance. Not the wanting of things to be as they were, nostalgia is different- it is the lens that sees few facts and excludes the kind of comparison that allows depth and dimension. Longing, in contrast, blooms exclusively in our (limited) finite form and blossoms later in the further end of life's field. It is a place of paradox that offers views of everything at its most expansive in exchange for an additional poignant perspective - life is a song of appreciation that for most of us will end only partially sung.

Above: Scott Beck

For me, longing is as inexhaustible and intricate as the expressive poetry found in the micro seasons of the traditional Japanese calendar. The interpretive timetable takes twenty-four cyclical changes and splits them into seventy-two seasonal observations, each lasting about five days. A few of the ones I enjoy most are: 
June 11-15 - "Rotten grass becomes fireflies", 

November 22-26 - "Rainbows hide", 

January 1-4 - "Wheat sprouts under snow."

Above: Benamin Terrell
Below: Scott Beck

A painting practice (and even a body of work) produces its own comparable calendar, invariably documenting the way the artist resists or invites the push and pull of life's micro movements. The paintings of mine chosen for this show are all of the same subject- water, land and a destination. My hope was that repeated inquiry, much like a mantra, could lead to a place for reverence beyond the limitations of what can be known. I believe creation concerns itself not with who or what is sincerely created, only that there is continual creation to amplify the spark of nameless awe.

Benjamin Terrell

​I love Scott Beck's painting and was excited to pair my work with his. I imagined our work together would produce an enjoyable dialogue detailing yearning. Beck's work, frames of figures facing unknown arcs, often teeters between emotions and resists the context of a storyline that allows a viewer to decide how they feel about what they are invited to witness. Perfumed with possibility, the result reveals a little ledge where we rarely stand and before the jumping in, retreating or resisting, life is a vista of unanticipated dimensionality. Longing offers similar views, is also a connective place and it can function as an emotional airport that provides equal perspectives of destination and point of origin. While my work is an inversion of Beck's- I paint unpopulated external places and states of being, both of us are interested in edges and the thin spaces where knowledge dissolves into mystery. My hope is that our kindred conversation can, like two birds singing on different branches of the same tree, also be enjoyable beyond the need to know exactly why. Everything that mirrors life at most guesses what life is, and that ceremony is always initiated by the unnamable part of us that longs beyond the gravity of this form.

Above: Scott Beck
Below: Benjamin Terrell

You can see more work by Scott Beck and Benjamin Terrill...
     - at One Wall Gallery
     -on instagram: @scottbeckart and @benjamin_terrell_painting
     - on The Semi-Finalist: an interview with Benjamin Terrell; a column about Scott Beck
     - Scott Beck's 2022 show at 57W57ARTS in NY
     - Benjamin Terrell's show on MePaintsMe