Drive Out West

This 2017 exhibition at The Fine Art Society was inspired by the work of celebrated Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. It was a show with perhaps unprecedented variety in Beal’s career, Kassia St. Clair finding that “the colours and atmosphere of the exhibition strike the eye at first at carnivalesque, creating dissonance when they resolve upon closer consideration into something deeper and more complex”.

Amongst some typical Beal compositions of solitary bearded figures against abstract, otherworldly backgrounds are larger group pieces where limbs and figures intertwine with a tangible sense of fraught desperation. For balance, Beal’s fiancée Erica, is depicted multiple times with warmth, joy and love.