Rosa Brooks Beason

Critics who have praised Rosa Brooks Beason for “meticulous detail, instinctive sense of composition, natural expression and air of truth,” aptly describe her inborn talent. In judging the worth of her work, that is relevant but she shares these attributes with many artists. What is uniquely Rosa Beason’s is the enchantment of her storytelling. Each of her vivid paintings is well-populated with the people of her childhood in her southern Appalachian home at Bacchus, Tennessee soon after the turn of the century. Cornelia Justice, art critic, compares Mrs. Beason’s work to a “time machine” with which one may project oneself back into a wonderland of gristmills, horseshoe games at the local livery stable, huckleberry harvestings and sorghum molasses “stir-offs.” All these events and places come alive with happy, lively little figures going about their businesses and pleasures. The viewer of a Beason painting, perforce, becomes involved in the story she is telling and the stories are authentic folklore. Peter A. G. Brown, Director, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection, Williamsburg, Virginia observes that her paintings would be valuable not only to art historians, but they will have much to say to the social historians of the future. A self-taught artist whose first efforts were rendered with house paint, Rosa Beason has achieved recognition with many showings that include an exhibition of her paintings selected by the Smithsonian Institution National Collection of Fine Arts for the United States Senate Rotunda Galleries. In New York City at the Museum of American Folk Art or at Berea College in her now homestate of Kentucky her work invokes the magic of nostalgia. Mrs. Beason’s place in American art seems assured. In the lobby lounge of the National Press Club a Beason painting hangs between an N. C. Wyeth and a Norman Rockwell. It is holding its own!

Rosa Brooks Beason Images:
Appalachian Homestead
Happy Times