Beerman’s work accumulates materials and incremental changes that reflect the painter’s daily life, her performative process, and the poetry that feeds it.
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I look for certain qualities in a painting: simplicity, directness, lightness, curiosity. These qualities, in addition to an odd brew of the intimate and the carnivalesque, first drew me to Hannah Beerman’s work. I’ve recognized her paintings right away ever since my original encounter. As closely as Beerman lives with her art and the objects that surround her and comprise it, there is both detachment and openness, a feeling anything could end up in one. I asked to interview her before we’d even met, and one afternoon, at her apartment and studio in East Williamsburg, we began talking and recording.
I was taken by her investment in literature, poetry, and experimental theater and learned about the San Francisco– based poets of the 1950s and ’60s, particularly Jack Spicer, who is of signal importance to her. Spicer once advised a young poet to try things where you risked falling “flat on your ass.”He added, “If you want to be dignified, there’s no reason to be a poet.” In Spicer’s poems, I discovered a gently radical otherworldliness coupled with a down-to-earth populism that expanded on what I had originally intuited in Beerman’s paintings. Hannah Beerman contributes to contemporary painting a new way of being sincere: to flirt with the ridiculous without seeming ridiculous. That’s not such an easy thing to do.
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Read the full interview in BOMB
