Each quarter we feature an artist in our Pinellas office on the Local Art Wall. Below is some information on our first guest artist – Nathan Beard.
Nathan Beard’s richly-layered Exit Music paintings combine playful Abstract Expressionism with fields of color that transition slowly through hue and temperature. He slices blue painter’s tape, strip-by-strip, and methodically applies it to create cyclic patterns that enhance the dimension and movement of roughly-hewn serpentine forms floating in a splatter-and-pour soup. Nathan often chooses colors for their metaphorical possibilities, and the dance between chaos and order helps him meditate upon the weaving of human will with natural forces as a creative activity that sculpts Space-Time to our adaptive needs and desires.
Drawing inspiration from the density and variety of Floridian flora, the natural and cosmological sciences, as well as mathematics and anthropology, Beard probes the space between our very linear experience of the world and the non-linear ways in which it continually transforms itself. Meditating upon the connective patterns underlying events at vastly different scales, he seeks a deeper understanding of the intricate relationships between matter, space, energy and time. Of special interest to Beard are the quandary of ultimate origin, the profound role that death plays in human psychology, and the paradox of the inwardly infinite.
Nathan creates in St. Petersburg, where he lives with his wife and daughter, and serves as Assistant Curator at Dunedin Fine Art Center. Nathan has exhibited extensively since 2013, including Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, Tampa Museum of Art, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), Highlands Museum of the Arts, Gallery 221, Olivet Nazarene University, Dunedin Fine Art Center, Morean Arts Center, JADA Art Fair (Miami), and Brooker Creek Preserve. His work is in a number of private and corporate collections, including Great Bay Distributors, B2 Communications, MHK, Penny Hoarder, Osprey Properties, Sabal Trust and Tampa Bay Title. Nathan received a Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Grant in 2017. In January 2020, several of his large, multi-panel paintings were selected to serve in the Arts in Embassies program and will be on view at the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador until 2023.
See more of Nathan’s work at www.nathanbeardfineart.com.
