Exonian Profiles
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Artist Constance Beaty ’73: Creating Characters on Canvas
When it comes to painting, artist Constance “Kim” Beaty ’73 has a strong sense of theater. “I was always fascinated by the idea of suspension of disbelief,” she explains. “There’s no more thrilling moment than when you’ve brought the audience along with you. That’s also,” she adds, “what I like about painting.” Beaty knows a thing or two about both theater and painting. She comes from one of the first families of American theater: both her mother, Mary Rodgers, and brother Adam Guettel ’83 are successful composers, and her grandfather Richard Rodgers was, by almost any reckoning, the greatest Broadway composer of the 20th century. After graduating from college, Beaty worked as an actress in New York. But for the past 18 years, she’s been creating characters not onstage, but on canvas. Beaty is a gifted portrait painter who works painstakingly to understand and then embody her subjects—be they a Supreme Court justice or a 6-year-old child. For a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she spent hours in the courtroom sketching the justice at work; for younger subjects, she goes on play dates and to the park, all this before putting brush to canvas. “Some artists paint people as though they were inanimate objects,” she says. “I want to take time to get to know this person I’m trying to paint, to learn what’s going on beneath the surface.” While Beaty did not begin her formal study of painting until she was almost 30, she has been drawing since she was a young girl. At Exeter, she recalls “torturing everyone in my dorms by making them sit for me,” as well as spending long hours in the art studio, where art teacher Charles Carrico encouraged her to pursue her figurative work. She left Exeter for Yale with “a sense of art as a real possibility,” only to run into a solid wall of Abstract Expressionism, then in its heyday in New Haven as in the rest of the art world. “At Yale, I couldn’t get arrested,” she says with a wry chuckle. “But I didn’t want to be an abstract artist. I wanted to learn how to draw and to render the figure.” So she majored in French, and after graduating, confined her art to sketching backstage as she pursued her acting career in New York. She found work—including parts in a TV movie with Bette Davis and a Broadway play with Glenda Jackson—but not a lot of satisfaction. She was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her life when she had the kind of epiphany that, in a play, usually prompts the heroine to break into song. She wandered into New York’s National Academy of Design and saw a beautiful painting of a little girl hanging on the wall. Her face lights up at the recollection: “I saw that portrait and said,‘That! I want to do that.’ ” Soon Beaty was studying with Ronald Sherr, the artist who had painted that life-changing portrait, and getting the kind of technical training she had longed for in college. She also began winning prizes and, before long, commissions. Today, her work—both portraits and, more recently, landscapes—can be found in the collections of such figures as Kitty Carlisle Hart, William Ivey Long and Paul Rudnick. Her portrait of her mother, a former Academy trustee, hangs in the Assembly Hall. Few subjects today have the time to sit for a formal portrait, nor the patience to hold a pose for hours on end, so Beaty also relies on photos and sketches. The early stages of a portrait come relatively easily, she says; the hard part comes later, “when you’ve got to nail the likeness. You should get the same feeling from the portrait you get from the person in real life.” Then and only then do viewers happily surrender their disbelief and give themselves over to a painting. To do this, says Beaty, the painter must “decide what you want people to look at in the portrait, and then lead them to it. You don’t want anything upstaging the face.” She pauses and laughs. “It’s a lot like theater.” —Beth Brosnan To see more of Constance Beaty’s work, go to www.cpbeaty.com |
