Greg Beecham | Where the Animals Roam

Celebrated artist Greg Beecham has an innate connection to wildlife and nature that comes to life on his canvases.

By Bonnie Gangelhoff

Greg Beecham says at times he feels as if he lives in a zoo. On a recent March morning, the artist described the creatures that form the fabric of his daily life. For example, when he had peered out his hallway window earlier, two mule deer had stared back at him through the glass. A few nights prior to that, a mountain lion had roared past his driveway; and on the way to his studio recently, a black wolf had raced in front of his pickup truck. What more could an animal artist want than to live side by side with his subject matter?

Beecham and his wife, Lu, have called the small town of Dubois, Wyoming, home since 1997. Population in 2020: 911. It’s fair to say there may be more animals in the area than humans. Bison, black bears, bobcats and bighorn sheep are well-known residents. Butch Cassidy once owned a ranch in Dubois, and legend has it that he bought cigars at Welty’s General Store downtown.

Today, Beecham maintains a log cabin studio a few blocks from Welty’s, which is still in business. In the past months, the artist has been hard at work creating paintings for two prestigious shows: this June’s Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition & Sale at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Western Visions at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming in September. WHITETAILS AND WARM SPRINGS and HOT PURSUIT are going to be on view at Prix de West from May 31 through August 4, with the art sale weekend happening June 7 and 8.

The pieces embody two key elements of Beecham’s wildlife paintings: the animal’s unusual habitat and its gestures and behaviors. “If one listens when they are with the animals, they are always telling you something new,” Beecham says. “It may just be the atmosphere they exist in, the habitat itself, as in WHITETAILS AND WARM SPRINGS. But it may be a unique, cool gesture that gets my blood up as in HOT PURSUIT.”

Indeed, Beecham has a gift for capturing a sense of place as is displayed in the ethereal, snow-covered landscape of WHITETAILS AND WARM SPRINGS. In HOT PURSUIT the artist portrays a gray-haired wolf charging through a creek, kicking up the water as it scouts its prey. This is a quintessential Beecham work showcasing his talent for depicting movement and action.

A self-described realist painter, Beecham believes that the best realists incorporate abstraction. “They concentrate on creating beautiful, unified shapes—small shapes to big shapes that end up being accessible to viewers,” he explains. “The main thing is, the artist should think of related shapes, not stuff. I’m not painting an animal, tree, rock and stream. I am painting shapes that must unify into a cohesive composition.”

Unity in the context of simplicity and beauty is his mantra, Beecham says. Accessible abstraction best describes his style. When talking with the artist, it’s evident he has given much thought to what he is trying to convey in his work. Over the years he has turned to many painters for inspiration. But these days Beecham most often looks toward sculptors to fuel his creative juices. In fact, the artist is fond of saying his goal is to “sculpt with paint.” He wants to paint in such a way that there is not only the illusion of dimension but also genuine depth to the paint itself.

Animal artist Julie T. Chapman, who conducts workshops with Beecham, says she is impressed with the original way he wields the knife to build texture. “But technique without concept is flash without substance,” she says. “Greg’s technique is always in service to his vision of the sublime.”

For Beecham, sculpting with paint isn’t just the physical buildup of paint on the canvas. He also studies how a sculptor might handle a particular passage. “In studying George Carlson’s sculptures, I have learned a compositional understanding of a focal point emanating from a mass and yet remaining of the mass,” he says. “Creating the illusion of mass, weight and volume on a two-dimensional surface is intriguing to me. We artists are magicians in that sense.”

At a Masters of the American West show at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles one year, Beecham recalls receiving the ultimate compliment from another participating artist, Thomas Blackshear II. Blackshear studied Beecham’s work PAINT SPLASHES on view in the show, and said to Beecham, “It has weight.”

Beecham grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley, but from an early age his heart belonged to the West. When his Colorado-based grandmother visited, she often sang cowboy tunes for the family. The songs, stories and mythologies of the Western frontier stirred his imagination. His father, Tom Beecham, a well-known New York illustrator for outdoor magazines, taught his son to draw in the sixth grade. Frequently, the duo would venture into the woods where the elder pointed out shapes, anatomy and movement to his son. Beecham says he was getting schooled in art while getting to spend precious time with his father.

But Beecham’s world fell apart during high school. His parents announced they were divorcing. It was a difficult period for him, and he signed up for the U.S. Navy. While there, he continued to sketch animals. During this time he decided to pursue fine art as a career. “Growing up with an artist for a dad was instrumental in choosing this path,” Beecham says.

In 1978, after a three-year stint in the Navy, Beecham moved west and enrolled in classes at Southern Oregon University in Ashland. But he wasn’t satisfied with the art training. The one positive experience, he says, was that he met his wife. Eventually, Beecham decided the best art teacher for him lived in New York. Beecham packed up, returned home and spent the summer apprenticing with his father, who he describes as a tough taskmaster and critic.

A few months later Beecham, his wife and two children moved to the Seattle area when his wife was accepted into graduate school. For 15 years, he worked for Bantam Books as an illustrator creating pen and ink drawings for a World War II series, among other assignments. “I think I drew every tank, ship [and] piece of equipment ever used in the War,” he says.

However, Beecham spent most of his time in those years nurturing his fine art. He painted regularly, went on research trips to nature preserves and attended art shows. Slowly and painstakingly, he built his career.

Today, Beecham’s work is in the permanent collections of major Western museums, including the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the National Museum of Wildlife Art; and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

If you ask Beecham what his favorite animal to paint is, he replies that it’s the wrong question. His favorite creature to paint is “the one that speaks to him.” Sometimes “listening” can be challenging. He must act fast and photograph quickly to capture split-second movement with his camera. “A fox can race by, and it’s like seeing a line of color flash across my vision,” he says.

Once when Beecham was driving the “haul road” up by the Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, he spotted a wolverine. He got out of his car, and, to his surprise, the creature sprinted toward him with a caribou leg in its mouth. “He was about 20 yards from me,” Beecham recalls. “I didn’t want him to walk away, so I yelled at him. The gesture in my painting, THE PRIZE, is the moment he turned around to look at me. It speaks to how I let the animals tell me what to paint.”

These days all animals are not equal when you take them to the marketplace, Beecham says. Collectors tend to favor predators. “An aardvark is going to be a hard sell,” he jokes.

Beecham relishes painting the four-legged predators in his neighborhood. But recently while hiking in Arizona a grasshopper “spoke” to him and he answered with an evocative portrait of the insect. “Blowing up the image on my computer, I became fascinated by the utter complexity of such a small creature,” he says. “The saying ‘God is in the details’ came to mind. I felt like it should be painted.”

Like the aardvark, the grasshopper was a hard sell. It seems no one wants a larger-than-life insect on their living room wall. But marketplace demands won’t stop Beecham from painting what he chooses, all creatures great and small. He says, “Having painted wildlife for 46 years, I am still just as passionate about it and as thrilled to be with animals as I was in 1978 when I first started.”

Bonnie Gangelhoff is a Colorado-based writer and former senior editor of Southwest Art.

contact information
gbeecham.work

upcoming shows
Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition & Sale, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK, May 31-August 4.
Western Visions, National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, WY, September 2024.

This story appeared in the June/July 2024 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.