C.A. Beckston

I have been working with design and art (in various forms) - for over 20 years now and began my career drawing typefaces and making logos for restaurants and shops in a small advertising firm owned by my uncle. Learning the basic skills soon got me interested in classic art and I turned to the old masters for inspiration since I never cared much for modernistic art, that is to say "then", in the old days.

I grew quite fond of the romanticists, such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Caspar David Friedrich, and later on the impressionists for their bold colours and the classicists of the 17t...

I have been working with design and art (in various forms) - for over 20 years now and began my career drawing typefaces and making logos for restaurants and shops in a small advertising firm owned by my uncle. Learning the basic skills soon got me interested in classic art and I turned to the old masters for inspiration since I never cared much for modernistic art, that is to say "then", in the old days.

I grew quite fond of the romanticists, such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Caspar David Friedrich, and later on the impressionists for their bold colours and the classicists of the 17th century for their mastery of the human form. The only movement in the 20th century that I have found especially entruiging is the surrealist movement, which has always been about searching inwards, reinventing figurative abstraction (synthesis and memesis) - beyond traditional aesthetics.

As a "classical" painter I focused on linear painting, which is a certain style of art that has "closed form", principally found in the works of Jacques-Louis David, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Nicolas Poussin.

Five artist in particular have had a big impact on me; Eugenè Delacroix, Rembrandt H. van Rijn, Fredric Leighton, Gustav Klimt and Salvador Dalì. Their visual language is often seen in my works.

When it comes to reading and studying art theory and history, I am quite interested in pictorial modernism and art-critical discourses, such as the ones that can be found in the writings of arthistorians, for example Michael Fried or further back, by iconic artcritics such as Heinrich Wölfflin. What art is and how deeply it affects us, can be judged by how much it makes us look further inside ourselves. The world is full of pictures that makes us understand it a little better.

Why artists do what they do can be summed up by this qute from Charles Baudelaire:

"An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion."

If I were to name my style I would have to come up with a name that has bits and pieces from all of those artistic expressions that I am fond of; perhaps ‘embratic’ is a fitting name; that would be a style of art that embraces everthing but still holds its own, unique voice.

Out of the 300 albums I have worked on; I have picked out some few jems that you might like. These where painted / collaged with digital software such as Photoshop or Painter and I also used a Wacom digitalboard.