David Becker’s Field Notes

Just a few miles from Frederic Church’s iconic Hudson River estate, Olana  – a farm that began as a rural getaway but grew into a global cultural site – artist David Becker has established his own 20-acre plot, where, like Church, he both manages a farm and makes paintings. In a process of cross-fertilization, his Field Notes record the agricultural work of planting, tilling and watering his crops, even as they generate a series of images that enrich his process of painting. Where Church aspired to render Alexander von Humboldt’s global vision of nature, documenting natural species from around the world and combining small studies into large-scale paintings, Becker interweaves the universalizing impulse of abstract art and the modern practices of industrial agriculture, subdividing photographs of his property made from a drone into square modules, like snapshots, to provide fields for his paintings. 

Rather than follow through on this minimalist process by rendering them as flat patterns, Becker treats each frame as a distinctive evocation of natural growth. He employs an unusual combination of dry pastels and water-based acrylic paints to create layered compositions within the loosely defined quadrants of each module. The mixture of acrylic paint and the lush material pigments of pastels generates submerged colors like the smoldering red of Row Crops and the tender tactile tendrils of First Rye, a fusion of painting and agriculture that harks back to Vincent van Gogh’s response to springtime in Arles, to furrowed fields and blossoming fruit trees. Just as Van Gogh loved the geometry of perspective and applied the dense impasto of his tilled fields in broad overviews, Becker uses the repeated horizontals of his own Tilled Fields to record the aerial view of the drone. Liberating his hand from the fixed eye-point of perspective, he can indulge in improvisatory linear invention in First Daffodil and combine it with rectangles of pure colors or suggest emerging growth from rich topsoil in layering umber and red in First Till. 

Becker tempers van Gogh’s exuberance with his modular minimalism. His work has other precedents in the Bay Area where he was born, such as Wayne Thiebaud’s panoramic overviews of the Sacramento Delta or Richard Diebenkorn’s Berkeley Paintings, which were inspired by views from an airplane. The intervention of technology reminds us of the harsh reality of what environmental novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has called the “factory floor” of industrialized contemporary agriculture, for its elimination of local flora and fauna. But with his interest in music and experimental cinema, Becker infuses this stark, modern landscape with kinetic syncopation. He recalls the restorative purpose of his plantings, which affirm the ongoing vitality of a strategy of process, just as their ongoing production reaffirms the regenerative potential of fundamental visual values. 

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David Becker: Field Notes, October 17–November 14, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17, 1–5 PM

Philip Douglas Fine Art, 545 Warren St., 2nd Floor, Hudson, New York