Exit Music: Continuum

About EXIT MUSIC: Continuum:

Played as patrons leave a movie or theatrical performance, Exit Music helps usher our senses from the imaginary world back to the mundane.

Beard employs Exit Music as a metaphor for transition through liminal space. Meditating upon the connective patterns underlying events, Beard seeks a deeper understanding of the intricate relationships between matter, space, energy, and time.

Of special interest to Beard are the difficulty of ultimate origin, the paradox of the inwardly infinite, and the profound effects of fallible memory upon the transmission of history, shaping of culture, and dynamics of personal relationships. Beard’s richly-layered Exit Music paintings combine playful Abstract Expressionism with fields of color that transition slowly through color and temperature. He slices blue painter’s tape, strip-by-strip, and methodically applies it to create cyclic patterns that enhance the dimension and movement of roughly hewn serpentine forms floating in an expressionistic soup.

Beard often chooses colors for their metaphorical possibilities, and the dance between chaos and order helps him meditate upon the weaving of human will with natural forces as a creative activity that sculpts Space-Time to our adaptive needs and desires.

Bio Nathan Beard:

Beard creates in St. Petersburg, FL, and serves as Assistant Curator at Dunedin Fine Art Center. He grew up on a dairy farm in western New York. Prior to his university studies, Beard lived in Egypt for one year as an exchange student and, upon his return, worked as a cowboy in Wyoming for two years. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Colorado State University in 2001, he worked in galleries and as an Art Consultant in Denver, CO for seven years, and as an art installer for public and private clients throughout Tampa Bay. Beard has exhibited extensively since 2013, including at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, Tampa Museum of Art, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), Gallery 221/Hillsborough Community College, Olivet Nazarene University, Dunedin Fine Art Center, Morean Arts Center, JADA Art Fair (Miami), and Brooker Creek Preserve. His work is in numerous private and corporate collections, including Framework Group, Silversaw Residences, Grand Bohemian Hotel, Parkview Medical Center, Great Bay Distributors, B2 Communications, MHK, Penny Hoarder, Osprey Properties, Sabal Trust, and Tampa Bay Title. In January 2020, several of Beard’s large paintings were selected for the Arts in Embassies program at the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador.