Bend in the River is a color mixed technique intaglio created in 1960 by American printmaker Dennis Ray Beall. It is pencil signed, titled, dated, and editioned 1/15. Bend in the River was printed by the artist on a sheet of ivory wove Arches paper and the platemark measures 11-13/16 x 17-9/16 inches.
Bend in the River was created using a combination of etching and aquatint. Beall relied on gesture and spontaneity to create this fluid Abstract Expressionist intaglio. A friendship with artist John Ihle led him to work in intaglio in the late 1950s.
Dennis Ray Beall, printmaker, educator, curator, and administrator, was born in Chickasha, Oklahoma in 1929. After serving in the U.S. Navy, which included attending Electronics Materiel School on Treasure Island off San Francisco, he returned to Oklahoma in 1950 to attend Oklahoma City University. Relocating to California in 1953, Beall enrolled at San Francisco State University, where he was part of a group of printmakers that experimented with the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism, using lithography.
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 E. Gunter Troche. He held that position until 1965 when he began his teaching career at San Francisco State University where he taught printmaking.
Dennis Ray Beall is represented in the collections of the Janet Turner Print Museum, California State University Chico; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the University of Oklahoma, Norman; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
