Magical, Neo-romantic, Performatist Realism is a collection of work utilizing drawing techniques, oil pastel (often applied in a thick painterly fashion), paper cut-outs, film and photographic processes, sgraffito and etching ink begun in 2014, and revisited in 2021. The work seeks to articulate the complexity of the artist’s inner, and outer worlds through the frame of twelve sequential artistic visions.

Ken Beckwith is a graduate from Columbia College of Chicago, with an undergraduate degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He has lived and worked in Monterey, California, alongside the ocean for the world renowned, Monterey Bay Aquarium. He is a student of the Icelandic language, and teaches art to children in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood today.

Far removed from commercial, and public appeal, the message behind Ken’s work is deeply personal. He speaks directly to a close few, illustrating a need to reach out (for a better world) while recognizing simultaneously, the ultimate futility of that extension. In that metaxy, Ken reconstructs meaning for his viewer through a set of his own transcendent, hermeneutic signs and symbols.