David Becker: Field Notes
David Becker’s small, square Field Notes paintings are like windows looking out into the natural world, the forest, and the fields, except each pane shows us a different time, different view, and different weather – as if nature, that day, couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. Translating his experience of nature into abstract images, Becker isn’t creating idealized landscapes like those of the Hudson River School, but representations of farmland and the human labor that goes into it. While most painters of nature are centered purely on the visual, Becker is actively involved in the entire life cycle of the varieties he plants, tends, and harvests on the arable eight acres of his 40-acre property. From there, he turns its images into energy, and its energy into images.