Bob Beach

Bob has been an artist since the day he saw Rembrandt's Man in the Golden Helmet in an exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art at age four. He drew and painted his way through elementary and high school, where he was first introduced to silk screen printmaking. He studied art and design at Bowling Green State University (the first design major in the school's history) and the University of Illinois, and holds BS and MFA degrees.

Bob's first career was in the field of marketing, where he worked as a graphic designer, photographer, TV/film director, writer, web developer and, finally, marketing consultant. Along the way he founded a graphic design studio, a film production house, an advertising agency, a marketing firm and a web development business - all major players in the Toledo communications industry. He also collected many local, regional and national awards for his work in print, film, television, photography, corporate identity, packaging, advertising, exhibitions and web design, including a lifetime achievement award from the Advertising Club of Toledo.

His commercial work in silk screen printing for posters, packaging and displays revived his interest in the medium, and he continued making prints in his spare time throughout his marketing career. When he retired to his home studio in 1988 and returned to school for his MFA, he also began a serious exploration of the serigraphic process as a fine art.

Bob's use of many layers of transparent, textured color gives his work a depth and richness not typical of serigraphy, which is usually associated with large areas of solid, bold paint. His prints carry as many as 50 applications of color, sometimes overprinting a single area as many as 10 times.

Although serigraphy has been his traditional medium, since the beginning of 2004 he has worked primarily in acrylic painting and collage on paper, which has brought new styles, directions and energies to his work. Additionally, he is exploring the new medium of the giclee (digital printmaking with an ink jet printer, pronounced "gheeclay") as new technologies and materials have begun to allow archival quality prints.

Bob Beach currently resides and works (and occasionally teaches) in Maumee, Ohio (a suburb of Toledo). You can contact him by snailmail, phone or email.