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My paintings are of surreal scenes that reflect on the conflict between nature and humankind.  I didn’t initially set out to make surrealist or environmental work.  Originally, I painted mainly figures and landscapes. But I wasn’t satisfied with this because the paintings felt too beautiful and one-dimensional.  I wanted the paintings to be darker.

At roughly the same time as this, I had also been taking photographs, which were inspired by Francesca Woodman’s photographs.  Her photographs are mainly self-portraits and usually have a bizarre, almost surreal element to them.  She would use unexpected props and strange locations and create the most interesting juxtapositions.  This inspired me to do things like that, and soon I was looking for hidden places to stage photos or collecting my own props.  Through this process of collecting my own props and locations, I started finding what interested me visually.  I would find cement walls or bridges in the middle of nowhere, or a field of oil derricks next to a playground, or piles of rusted out cars in the desert.  As I took photographs, I realized I was ultimately interested in a sort of humankind versus nature dynamic.

So I returned to painting, looking to apply the ideas I had come across through photography.  Ultimately in painting I had much more freedom to explore them, and include even more.  I wasn’t restricted to using found people, costumes, locations & props. I wasn’t even restricted to showing one-sixtieth of a second. I started to find inspiration everywhere—the news, my neighborhood, things I saw growing up, Bob Dylan lyrics, myths and Bible stories.

I like to approach painting as if I were writing a song—I want my images to stay in people’s heads for a while.  It’s important to me that the images have a bit of mystery and that they don’t spell things out exactly.  They are not meant to have a specific message, but instead they are there to evoke a mood.  While the paintings are meant to be beautiful, I think that the sweetness of them actually heightens the disturbing quality of the content creating a tension that to me is similar to how I feel about what is going on in the world today.

BIO

Bekka’s art is a contemplation of humankind’s mark on the earth, as well as an exploration of what our future holds.  She creates surreal scenes with juxtapositions of natural and man-made elements as well as animals, people, and time periods. Heavily inspired by music and poetry, her paintings have an innocent haunting quality while portraying weighty contemporary themes.  Now living in Los Angeles, Bekka spent her childhood living in various cities such as Salt Lake City, Boston, and Jerusalem.  She studied painting and creative writing at Brandeis University and also participated in Yale University’s Summer School of Art & Music at Norfolk.