Jack Beal's highly realistic oil from 1981,The Painting Lesson, can be passably studied and appreciated as reproduced on this page. But for optimum effectiveness, the spectator really must confront the seven-by-eight-foot painting firsthand. Then one realizes fully that the people depicted are life-sized, and that the studio interior (despite the exaggerated, tipped-up perspective) appears as a continuation from the observer's real space. Because scale both within and without the painting is approximately the same, one can emphatically project into the scene far more readily than were the piece smaller. An awareness comes quickly that what the teacher and his students are looking at so intently - - presumably the subject or set-up they are trying to capture on their canvases is none other than the viewer. Involving the observer as an active participant is a characteristic of much Beal work. He acknowledges: "Communications with the audience has become for me as necessary a factor as the aesthetics of the picture."

In The Painting Lesson, Beal and the viewer communicate in a subtle yet direct and personal way. The stocky, blond, bespectacled instructor, who leans forward to point out something in the woman student's work, is the artist's own likeness. During a 1983 informal conversation with Richard N. Gregg, director of the Allentown Art Museum, Beal further explained the idiosyncratic imagery of the painting: The two students are also real individuals. The woman, whose name is Ellen Hutchenson, actually is not a painter, but rather Beal's bookkeeper. The bearded man is artist-friend Dean Hartung. Amidst the seeming clutter of the room, one may find fragmentary visual references to works by eighteen artists whom Beal admires, including: David, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Caravaggio, Millet, Corot, and Manet. The plastic "Visible Man" at lower left center is, according to Beal, an important personal symbolic device, to suggest that beauty originates from within the self. The curious dark painting on the easel in the background, upper right corner, is another self-portrait. That he here appears to be "stabbed in the back" by the blade-like edge of an artwork alludes to an unpleasant experience he had while teaching at the Skowhegan Art School in Maine. Beal and his wife are frequent flea-market patrons, and some of the items they have acquired are part of the disarray. All of these "props" are components in a carefully staged arrangement of shapes, textures, angles, and directions. Moreover, the heavily tactile, richly colored, and dramatically lighted tableau is mildly reminiscent of the Dutch still-life tradition, for which Beal developed considerable enthusiasm after seeing many such works on a 1980 European trip. "I am making twentieth-century pictures," he said in an interview, "but I've learned a lot from my sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colleagues." He went on to reveal:

My whole painting career I've searched for an equitable balance between human needs and aesthetic needs. It's a very exciting conflict. Clearly I'm a modern painter, but my interests are extremely varied and I try to draw stimulation from all kinds of sources . . . I'm trying to paint people and things the way I think most people see people and things. And I am trying to paint them as they are.

Beal divides his residency between New York City and his farm near Oneonta in upstate New York. He was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1931. He attended the College of William and Mary and later the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his bachelor's degree. At the time of his graduation, the abstract-expressionist movement was nearing its height, and Beal was working accordingly in an abstract style. Eventually he rejected non-objective art in favor of the realistic manner that has typified his painting since the late l960s. Though he prefers to call himself a "life artist" rather than a realist, he is undeniably one of the principal figures responsible for the revival of realist and narrative art as valid and critically recognized contemporary expression.