JEFFREY BECOM ( b. 1953 - ) Formally trained as an architect and distinguished as a fine art color photographer, Jeffrey Becom has also been a painter since the age of eight, growing up in rural Indiana. In all of these three pursuits—painting, photography, and design— his artistic sensibilities lie squarely in the colorist realm. Becom’s passion is painted walls and the extraordinary history, symbolism and power encoded in their forms and colors. An inveterate traveler and visual anthropologist, he finds inspiration in the vibrant façades of village architecture around the globe. Walls offer him subject and palette from which to derive his own art while he, in turn, celebrates the innate genius of the cultures that build and paint the places he explores, from India, Peru and Ecuador to Mesoamerica and the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Plein air and in-studio painting using oil and wax medium on panel—whether along California’s coast or of Early California-era Spanish Colonial adobes and missions—are Becom’s antidote to his complex and highly detailed architectural watercolors. His landscapes and architectural compositions allow him to experiment with color interactions more quickly and intuitively. He approaches both the natural world and the built environment with an expressionist’s eye, rewarding viewers with crimson seas, purple shadows, magenta trees, and turquoise clouds floating in chartreuse skies. Jeffrey Becom has co-authored two award-winning books, Mediterranean Color and Maya Color: The Painted Villages of Mesoamerica (Abbeville Press, 1990 and 1997, New York). He is the subject of an hour-long PBS/BBC documentary titled For the Colors that follows him on a journey throughout Italy as he paints and photographs. Over the past fifty years, Becom’s works have been exhibited in more than 100 solo and group shows in museums and galleries across the country. They are held in private and public collections and institutions worldwide. His photographs are represented on the Central Coast by the Weston Gallery in Carmel. He is proud to offer all of his paintings exclusively through the Carmel Art Association where he was juried in as an Artist Member in 2012. He currently serves as CAA's Board President. “Brilliantly poised between abstraction and realism, Jeffrey Becomhas two missions: the documentation of disappearing architecturalcultures and the creation of beautiful works of art. He is not the firstto combine these often contradictory goals, but he does it more freshly,more carefully, and more joyfully than any artist in our time.” —–—Paul Goldberger, New Yorker Magazine columnist, author, and Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic