Garden of Evil

Dennis Ray Beall

Garden of Evil is one from a group of Abstract Expressionist color lithographs Beall created between 1955 and 1958 while he was a graduate student at San Francisco State College. He had learned the basics of lithography from Duayne Hatchell while a student at Oklahoma City University in 1950. Braced with the knowledge gleaned from lithography manuals by Bolton Brown and Lynton Kistler and the support of his teacher at SFSC, John Ihle, Beall developed his techniques for working the stone which resulted in seemingly spontaneous, gestural drawing.

Because of the lack of galleries willing to exhibit their works and virtually no collectors, the editions of these works were small, meant more to trade with colleagues, so they are quite rare. Beall and John Ihle helped establish lithography at San Francisco State College and used the medium as a painter uses a canvas, covering the whole stone with the image. When you look at the lithographs that were created at SFSC in the mid 1950s you began to recognize the stones that were used by the irregular edges, chips that had occurred to the limestone matrix over the years.

Beall described the process he used in 1963 in an exhibition catalogue for a show of works by George Miyasaki at the Achenbach Foundation: "By using a strong solution of acetic acid between drawings, the stone may be re-sensitized without regrinding. Areas of the preceding drawing may be retained, other areas scrubbed or scraped, new design elements introduced, old ones reinforced and, in general, the reconciliation of design and color development more cohesively obtained and controlled...The enormous freedom implied by this system lies in its directness. The communication between the artist and his materials, the successive acts of printing, drawing, scrubbing, and correcting create a continuum which cannot be duplicated in the traditional workshop."

Beall was registrar at the Oakland Museum of California briefly in 1958 before becoming a curator at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in San Francisco, working with Gunter Troche. He held that position until 1965 when he began his teaching career at San Francisco State University where he taught printmaking.