It’s a big week for Stacy Beam. The Nashville artist is celebrating his first museum exhibit for his paintings, at Cheekwood in Nashville. The exhibit coincides with the Chihuly at Cheekwood event, which is now open.
“I reached out to [Curator of Exhibitions] Campbell Mobley and I suggested, ‘Why don’t I come out there and paint?'” Stacy explained to Everything Nash. “It didn’t work then, but then she came back to me with this exhibition idea. She invited me and four other local Nashville artists to submit art for en plein air, which is a French phrase that means ‘painting outside.’ It’s going to be at the same time as the Chihuly opens.
“I went up there the whole month of June and painted whatever I wanted to paint, and submitted eight paintings for that exhibition,” he added. “They’ll choose what they want from that. And it’s my first museum exhibit. So I’m thrilled. I’m beside myself. It’s great.”
Stacy enjoyed painting at Cheekwood, even if it wasn’t without mishaps. He recalled one incident where things didn’t go exactly as planned, but he still ended up with one of his best pieces of work.
“One day I was out at Cheekwood painting,” he recounted. “Schlepping my stuff all around for an hour and a half looking for a place to paint. I landed at the bottom pond. There’s three big ones. The first one it’s really nice, and you can kind of stick your feet in. The second one was a little bit more muddy. The third was also a bit dirtier that day. I dropped my easel into the water there; I started painting there and it was just one thing after another. It started pouring right on my head.
“I went over to the Japanese garden and started painting there,” he continued. “I was so upset that I wiped all that work I had done off. I was just mad. On the way back to the car, I stopped in the Bamboo Garden, and just started making these scratches in the paint that was already there, and it started to resemble bamboo. That ended up being The Bamboo Garden. But every time I do it, the process is a little bit different. I found that going over old things can add a layer of interest that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.”
Find details about visiting Cheekwood, including COVID-19 regulations, by visiting their website. Find more of Stacy’s art at StacyBeam.com.
