Jennifer Beckman

Before she began a professional career in landscape architecture, Jennifer Beckman was an established artist represented by several Bay Area galleries. Her career in California followed an earlier period in Maine as an acclaimed local painter and ceramicist. After finishing her degree in Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley, she now combines these passions by working part time in a collaborative architecture and design studio (CRKW.com) and in her own painting studio, both based in Sacramento, California.

Able to translate abstract ideas onto canvases or landscape plans, Jen captures California landscapes in painterly renditions both as two- dimensional paintings and in three-dimensional form expressed through her client’s gardens.  Both ways of seeing involve the dynamic relationship between form and color, rhythm and shapes, lights and darks – resulting in her own unique expression of the natural world.

Having been raised in the Great Northwest exploring nature through backpacking, hiking, mountain climbing, and birding, shaped my environmental sensibilities early on.  As a result, I have always been deeply enamored with the natural world. At 10 years of age, I climbed Mt Hood and other peaks in the Cascades, and backpacked to the Three Sisters wilderness to set up for 2 weeks at a time. As a teen I earned money planting tree seedlings in harsh Oregon winters. These experiences shaped not only my endurance and character, but more importantly my love of nature and fostered my desire to promote conservation early on. In high school and college I was actively engaged in conservation issues. Throughout my adult life, my interests in the arts took center stage but my commitment to the natural world runs long and deep and high, and is integral to my landscape paintings as well as my landscape and garden design. 

Get in touch with Jen!

Muses 

A Tribute to Etel Adnan:

A dear friend and creative soul — Etel Adnan — has always been a deep source of inspiration for me. I met her first through her words. Poetry, prose, philosophical discussion. Then to discover a shared love of color. Red to start. When I moved from Maine, where my painting palette was primarily made up of cool colors (reflective of the granite mountains and blue ocean views of Mt Desert Island), to California, I discovered RED for what felt like the first time. Etel loves to start her landscape paintings with a red square. Her “first” favorite painter was Paul Klee — as he was also for me, I was thrilled to learn. Early on in my California painting days, she cautioned me not to get too attached to my work — “It brings bad luck to hold on, letting go is about making room for the newness to come.”  For me, Etel’s creativity is fueled by a fearlessness that continues to inspire me as I forge new territory in my own landscape paintings. Her bold commitment to her vision is deeply compelling and she has created her own visual language that reminds us all to find and celebrate our unique authentic voices. www.eteladnan.com

A Tribute to Richard Powers: 

My latest paintings exploring verticality in the landscape, and trees especially, are inspired by my having read the brilliant novel by Richard Powers, “The Overstory.”  His novel speaks eloquently and uses his artful language to draw a deeply compelling picture of how interrelated all things in the natural world are.  If I were so inclined, this book would be my bible — a true environmental manifesto that helps inspire a new way of being in the world, one that restores honor for nature and awakens our ability and desire to care for this one precious planet we are so lucky to inhabit. www.richardpowers.net