The mechanics of building a picture

Beckett’s approach to creating a painting is subtle. She includes recurring themes or subject matter combined with clear structural devices such as the use of horizontal and vertical lines. Beckett also plays with light and the illusion of distance (recessive space). She abandoned pre-existing compositional rules such as the grid of the Golden Mean, which had been used by artists for centuries to create a work of art that was pleasing to the eye using a mathematic principle. Instead, Beckett adopted an apparent random approach to frame her landscape views. This seemingly spontaneous and unstructured painting method includes the use of overlapping planes to create a fragmented quality, and inadvertently propels her work into a modernist space.

Beckett uses filtered light as a way to dissolve overall form rather than to build up individual elements within the composition. Her use of diffused light creates a close tonal range, which dissolves the boundaries between the areas of light and shade and, thereby, cliff, tree and water. The soft melting edges of her forms are barely perceptible, and planes appear to shift from one into the other to create an extraordinary breath-like dreamy harmony, as Max Meldrum famously stated ‘there are no lines in nature’.

Beckett made use of refracted light to convey the phenomena of nature in terms of light and colour. In Wet sand, Anglesea, 1929, and Tranquility, 1933, her glimmering and shimmering painted effects take the viewer to the edge of spatial orientation. The sun is gone, yet strips of beach and the ochre cliffs dissolve into a unified shifting field of luminous, fluid colour. Here, Beckett edges the rendering of nature almost into cosmic abstraction.

A feature of many of Beckett’s compositions is the use of extreme horizontal and vertical lines. She regularly broke the rules of composition by placing a strong vertical in the centre of her images, as is evident in The last flush, c. 1928. As curator Tracey Lock describes ‘here she counterbalances the scene with a shadowy form on the left; filled with reminders of twilight, the dominant vertical seems to connect the physical world to a timeless higher reality’. Beckett reverses this approach in Wet night, Brighton, 1930, where the centre is a void of air above the suggestion of a road leading into the limitless sea. This flooded scene is framed by four posts, which optically work as two vertical bands running across from top to bottom of the picture plane.

Beckett also often framed her views from elevated viewpoints or through foreground structures like trees – as though she had arrived at the spot by chance – to depict a spontaneous glimpse of the natural world.