Few painters enjoy either commercial or artistic success. Rarer still is the artist who attains one without sacrificing the other.
Robert Beckmann, who has been selected as the Best of Las Vegas Publisher's Pick for Best Local Artist, is among that exclusive group who make a good living by producing top-notch art.
"It is very rare, and he is doing it," says Jim Stanford, co-owner of Smallworks Gallery, 101 E. Charleston Blvd., and an officer with the Contemporary Arts Collective, 103 E. Charleston Blvd.
In interviews with members of the local arts community, several comments about Beckmann recur: He has produced at a high level for decades, and he deals in ideas.
"He had been plugging away for a very long time without recognition, and the last five years it has finally come to him," says Constance DeVereaux, executive director of the Allied Arts Council of Southern Nevada.
Conducting a tour of the Henderson home he designed himself, Beckmann, 57, is almost apologetic about the initial romanticism that marked his commitment to live the life of an artist.
It was 1970, and he was on the art faculty at Northern Illinois University. The position provided financial stability, but he had grown increasingly tired of the associated hassles. So he quit to devote all of his time to painting.
Like others of his generation, he was frustrated by his inability to effect the changes he believed were necessary. When he thought about it, he realized he had another option.
"What I can do is paint, and try to put down what I think and what I feel and find my conscience there," he says.
The walls of his home bear examples of the varied styles he has pursued. Common to all of them is a respect for ideas, including the spirituality that has fallen into disfavor in some art circles.
"I've always been curious about a lot of different things," says Beckmann, who as a child made the Philadelphia newspapers when he built a Geiger counter, went into the countryside and actually detected trace amounts of uranium.
The recent success to which DeVereaux referred is of two types.
There are the dozens of murals Beckmann has painted in casinos, public buildings and other locations. Among the most recent are the four murals hanging in the lobby of an office building at 3960 Howard Hughes Parkway.
Each mural portrays a Southern Nevada landscape, with water as the common theme. A golf course green stands in the background of one, a water hazard prominent in the foreground. Another, a mural of white-capped Mount Charleston, traces water to its source.
Beckmann also has achieved acclaim for his fine art, which he defines as paintings created in a studio and shown in a gallery.
His "Body of a House" series has toured the United States, and even Russia, to much applause.
The exhibit consists of eight oils on canvas, each measuring 6 1/2 feet by 8 feet. Drawing on film shot by the federal government, Beckmann captures the destruction of a two-story house by an atomic bomb detonated at the Nevada Test Site in 1953.
Other Beckmann pieces in recent years have been shown in locales as far ranging as New York City, Yale University, the Smithsonian Institution and the Helsinki City Art Museum.
The quality of his work made the Pennsylvania native the most common name cited when local art experts were asked to identify the top local artist.
For instance, almost a dozen artists were considered when the question was put to directors of the Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art during a recent board meeting. Gallery Administrator Bonnie Ashe reported back the results of the informal poll.
"First of all, Robert Beckmann," she notes. "Everyone mentioned him."
In that poll and in interviews with other local art aficionados, a handful of other artists cropped up time and again.
Prominent among these was Jose Bellver, a Pahrump resident who teaches art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The 54-year-old Madrid native was cited for Excellence in the Arts by the Governor's Arts Awards in 1997.
"There is an unbelievable sincerity in his work," says Stanford, of the Smallworks Gallery.
Again, there was a consistency to the comments about Bellver.
First, there is the technical expertise that calls to mind the European masters. This is combined with a personal style that is entirely contemporary.
The artist attributes the effect in part to his European training and his exposure to American culture. "Americans are very image-oriented," he says.
Bellver, who is working on a painting in which monkeys rebel against Noah, came to Southern Nevada in the mid-1970s because it afforded "the space and the freedom to be who I am without anybody trying to change that."
Interestingly, two younger artists use quite similar words in explaining why they located here about five years ago.
Yek, 30, is a Singapore native. Jack Hallberg, 35, hails from Illinois. Both are products of the UNLV art program, and their careers have risen at a similarly steep trajectory.
"They show all over the country. In the art world, you win by winning," says UNLV faculty member Dave Hickey, an influential art critic.
Each of the young artists uses bright colors, but in different ways.
Yek can take as long as a week to shape one of his wooden canvases. Then he uses a spray-paint gun hooked up to a 12-gallon drum to apply the dominant color. Later, he adds a design -- some resembling a particularly intricate lightning bolt -- in a different color.
The process combines passive and aggressive elements. "It sparks emotion in people," Yek says.
Hallberg also works with bright colors, but in different ways. Common to his designs are bunches of smooth, round "globs" of paint that evoke images without literally representing them.
In the past, the two artists have worked in the same studio and shown in the same galleries in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Houston and elsewhere.
Though still good friends, they plan to pursue their own paths for a while. They recently displayed their work in separate rooms at the Lisa Livingstone Gallery, 3335 Cinder Lane.
Livingstone says Hallberg and Yek are the kind of artists she seeks to show in her gallery. "They are sophisticated, so their art is sophisticated," she says.
Another young artist who has shown his work at Livingstone's gallery has a decidedly religious bent.
There is a certain sophistication in the work of the Rev. Ethan Acres. But there also is something primitive. Born in Alabama in 1970, he was born again at Flat Rock Primitive Baptist Church in Tennessee in 1980.
The ordained minister incorporates his spirituality into his work, which he has shown throughout the West, in New York, and in such countries as Mexico and Latvia. Biblical imagery is central to his work.
"There is a lot of spirituality inside his art," Livingstone says.
Livingstone also speaks highly of another widely respected local artist.
Mary Warner, an associate professor of art at UNLV, has worked in a host of mediums, from pastels to velvet. "She's constantly evolving," Livingstone says.
In interviews, Stanford was among those who praised Warner's ability to capture an image, particularly flowers. "Her roses are incredible," Livingstone notes.
