As a child in Germany, he drew cowboys and Indians on used paper his mother brought home from work. And when the bombs came and destroyed their home, he painted the walls of the bomb shelter with images of castles he d seen around Koblenz.
Limited palette, he jokes.
Decades later, by dint of hard work, Pete Beckmann is one of our area s most successful artists.
This is a watershed week for Beckmann, 79: he shutters his long-time studio and opens an exhibit of his work Saturday in the American Gallery in Sylvania.
Tall, lean, and gentlemanly, Helmut Peter Beckmann is crisply turned out in tan pants and a sweater over a shirt. He shares a bright, modern home in Sylvania with Margot Beckmann, his wife of 56 years.
They figure he s sold between 3,000 and 4,000 paintings to individuals, decorators, and businesses. His work moves well at galleries in Toledo, Columbus, and Cleveland.
A February auction of art from the Owens-Illinois, Inc. collection did not include any of Beckmann s; his is displayed in the firm s Perrysburg headquarters.
He s painted commissions for the Cleveland Clinic, and an interior designer regularly purchased his serene, classic paintings for the clinic. A California company that makes high-quality posters of his art has sold more than 1,000 of them.
A San Francisco publisher, Editions Limited, makes high-quality giclee prints of his originals for catalog sale to designers, wholesale and residential art buyers, hotels, and businesses. In turn, Beckmann receives royalties.
He's painted more than 1,000 portraits, primarily using pastels and mostly of Toledoans. For 15 years he supplemented the family income by doing one every Saturday and one every Sunday, initially for $25.
In the 1960s, he held a couple of 12-student classes a week in the basement of his Westmoreland neighborhood home. He gave weekly painting demonstrations to full houses in his West Toledo gallery. And he delivered hundreds of witty lectures entitled "The Joy of Painting," peppered with poetry and philosophy. The talks usually included an on-the-spot painting which the group often raffled off as a door prize.
"I paint fairly fast. I don't fiddle around."
Beckmann seems accepting of the fact that he hasn't painted since surgery for a brain tumor in December, 2006.
"The brain doesn't tell the hand anymore what to do," he says, speaking more slowly than his rapid-fire delivery of yore. He's re-learned to walk and to write, and, come summer's balm, he may get out to the parks to brush canvases with his friends, the Monday Morning Painters.
"There's hardly any place around Toledo I haven't painted."
He lends an impressionist mood to land and seascapes, flowers and cottage gardens. "People used to ask me 'Where do you see those beautiful things?' I said 'Look around!' They'd say, 'The muddy, dirty Maumee?' It depends how you look at it."
Indeed, his Maumee River perspectives sell well, said Jamie Thompson, owner of Wildwood Antiques Center in Holland.
"I've handled his work through estates and been very successful with it," says Thompson. "They evoke the memory of the place."
Thompson says he'd place Beckmann in a league with respected regional artists such as Ruskin Stone, Earl North, Eleanor Roberts, and Lydia Reinfrank. "I know a lot of people who have his work hanging in their homes."
Adds Marcia Hall, director of the Bonfoey Gallery in Cleveland: "The water lilies are always nice, and the gardens. They're very calming and people certainly relate to them." Her gallery has sold them for years, currently at prices ranging from $2,000 to $3,000 and sometimes higher.
Kristin Meyer has sold Beckmann's art to a country club, hospital, a college, law firms, and the Columbus Dispatch. "Everything has a time of day because he concentrates on the light," notes Meyer, who owns the Art Exchange, Ltd. in Columbus.
Usually pulling images from his sharp memory but sometimes from his photographs, he begins by figuring out the emanation point of a scene's light.
"The light is the most important thing in the painting. They call it the soul of a painting. I call it the center of interest," says Beckmann. "Color's the last thing you worry about. You learn your colors when you paint flowers."
Beckmann was born in 1929; his parents divorced when he was 2 and his mother went to work. He was 20 or 21, working construction to rebuild war-devastated Germany when he met Margot at a Mardi Gras dance. She and her friend were dressed as cowgirls and she still falls into gales of laughter remembering how her friend accidentally gave him a bloody nose "all over his snow white shirt."
"I knew he painted," she says. "He painted my sisters."
They married in 1952 and, unable to obtain their own apartment, moved in with his Jewish grandmother in Dusseldorf. Two years later they struck out for Canada, which, with a population of just 15 million, was calling for immigrants.
"They needed flesh," says Beckmann. He could do construction and pipe fitting, and Margot was a seamstress. They settled in Edmonton, Alberta, found work, and studied English. It was bitterly cold and making friends was hard. They carefully set aside enough money for ship tickets back to Germany.
But a German friend living in Toledo helped them come to the United States and get settled. Margot was soon doing plenty of alterations on ladies' clothing and Beckmann found work at the union hall. As a consequence of years of working with and around asbestos and beryllium, he was diagnosed with asbestosis and has had part of a cancerous lung removed.
He joined an art club. For Christmas, Margot bought him oil paints.
"Then I developed an allergy to oil fumes so I painted in acrylics," he says. His early subjects were mountains and chalets, scenes he remembered from his homeland.
Working construction during the day, he'd often paint to music until 2 a.m. When he was laid off, he painted all day. He solicited commissions, painting whatever people asked him to. When he could afford it, he took art classes at the Toledo Museum of Art, the University of Toledo, and a Famous Artists correspondence course.
After their children were born, he and Margot bought a Volkswagen van fitted with a mattress for camping, and loaded his paintings in the back. The family headed for art shows where he'd sell his work and do sketches for $5.
"It was a hard time but we didn't feel it, we were young."
They realized the importance of promoting his work, helped by both of them being outgoing and upbeat. "Sometimes it felt silly to do," he says.
He was thrilled after a Michigan bank asked him to hang his paintings in their lobby and a man came in and bought them all. "We were happy to get $35 [each] for them."
He taught himself to do matting and framing, making his own frames from molding. Before he was 40, he decided to make the leap to full-time artist and opened Frames and Fine Arts Gallery at 1604 Sylvania Ave. with a partner in 1967. The partner soon quit, and Margot stepped in to handle the books and stretch needlework pieces women brought in for framing.
"It was successful from the start," he says. "We did not charge too much."
He stopped teaching classes at home but pulled people into the store by giving weekly talks and entertaining demonstrations. He donated hundreds of paintings to charitable groups for raffles. When artists didn't have cash to pay for framing, he'd do it in exchange for a piece of their work.
By 1983, his art was being sold at several galleries around the country. He closed the store and moved into a gallery at Common Space I, devoting himself exclusively to painting. He took autumn trips to New England to paint foliage and seascapes.
Their daughter, Patricia Beckmann Wells, is an animator and talent scout for Disney in Los Angeles. Their son, Michael Beckmann, works in human resources for Freddie Mac in suburban Washington and has two sons.
In January, 2007, as Beckmann recuperated from his brain surgery, a steam pipe burst in the ceiling of his gallery, soaking paintings, a cherished scrapbook, and ruining $6,000 worth of frames.
This week, they'll move the last tools and paintings from his gallery of 25 years to their finished basement.
"I was always an optimist, for better or worse," he says. "We've had a wonderful life."
Pete Beckmann's paintings will be at the American Gallery, 6600 Sylvania Ave., Sylvania, through May 31, opening Saturday with a 6 to 8 p.m. reception. Information: 419-882-8949.
Contact Tahree Lane at:
tlane@theblade.com
or 419-724-6075.
First Published April 27, 2008, 12:16 p.m.
