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When Jack Beal won a commission to paint murals for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1974, he built a new studio whose skylights appear in the background of this lithograph. Beal, one of the few realist artists of his era to paint from life rather than from photographs, thoughtfully reinterpreted what he saw in the mirror. Here, he shaped the fall of the light so that his visor’s shadow would cut his face diagonally in half and leave his eyes intriguingly obscured. Beal chose to show himself in a long-sleeved plaid shirt whose grid of lines let him model the fabric’s surface while compositionally balancing the diagonals of the skylights. As in all his realist art, he marshaled every element in the image to communicate his own ideas. Beal asks us to imagine that the realm inside the image is, as he once put it, “a world that is as real as this world.”
Cuando Jack Beal obtuvo el encargo de pintar murales para el Departamento del Trabajo de Estados Unidos en 1974, se construyó un taller nuevo cuyos tragaluces son el fondo de esta lito- grafía. Siendo uno de los pocos artistas realistas de su época que pintaban del natural y no a partir de fotos, Beal se miraba al espejo para retratarse y reinterpretaba meditadamente lo que veía. Aquí colocó la caída de la luz de modo que la sombra de su visera corta su cara en diagonal y le oscurece los ojos de manera enigmática. Beal se representa con una camisa escocesa de mangas largas, cuyo estampado en cuadrícula le permite modelar la superficie de la tela a la vez que contrapesa en la composición las líneas diagonales de los tragaluces. Como en todas su obras, ha manejado cada elemento de la imagen para comunicar sus ideas particulares y nos pide imaginar que el ámbito de la imagen es, como decía, “un mundo tan real como este mundo”.
