On the wrong side of the tracks in Fergus Falls, we drive past homes patched together by peeling paint, and climb up through the cement factory’s back lot. At the top of the hill, there’s a silver mailbox: C. Beck. A trail of faded wood steps carries us through the woods, over a ravine; the path becomes a bridge, the bridge becomes a porch lightly dusted by snow.
Among the firs is a driftwood-colored Bauhaus-style house. Charlie Beck comes to the door in a worn flannel shirt. He has the freckled complexion of a farm boy, faded into a pale chamois and framed by wild white hair.
Beck’s studio is much like any garage workshop in rural Minnesota. Cluttered work benches are pigeonholed with drawers, and punctured boards on the wall hold hooks for hanging tools. Duck decoys in various stages of disrepair congregate on a shelf. At one end of the room, light from a skylight spills onto a single woodcut print of winter poplars, illuminating a pattern of notched trunks. I notice a note on the woodcut reading "Cathedral." This is the road less taken, where tiny panes of light glimmer through the crisscrossed branches.
Beck is not so different, on the surface, than his deer-hunting, farming, small-town neighbors. As poet Mark Strand put it, Charlie Beck is "a modernist in regionalist camouflage." It is autumn when we talk: open fields of turned earth, the startle of a cloud, wisps of snow between the great skeletons of trees. Quarreling geese resolve on point, and the ancient gilded light lingers over bent grasses. "It’s this," Beck waves his hand at the world around him: the trees, the fields, the little barns on hills. "It’s a feast. The temptation [to create art] is everywhere."
Excerpted from a profile published in access+ENGAGE. Subscribe to this free arts e-magazine at mnartists.org/accessengage.
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