Garden of Evil is a color lithograph created in 1958 by American printmaker Dennis Ray Beall. It is pencil signed, titled, dated, and editioned 2/6. Garden of Evil was printed by the artist on a sheet of ivory Basingwerk Parchment wove paper and the images measures 23-3/4 x 17-5/8 inches.
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 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. Beall described the process 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.
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.
