One of the pioneers of the digital revolution, Jeffery Becton is a visual artist who has lived and maintained a studio in Deer Isle Maine since 1977. He received formal training at the Yale School of Art earning an MFA in graphic design in 1976.

As a full time resident of Maine, Becton is a member of a family with roots there since the 1700s. As an islander, Becton is especially drawn to the ocean, finding meaning and inspiration in its challenging and mercurial presence, the embodiment of the beauty and harshness of life and proximity of death. With material drawn from his natural surroundings, local homes, and personal imagery, Becton also draws from a vast collection of his ongoing photography to create his compositions. The resulting images exist as a medium somewhere between photography, collage, and painting that he refers to as digital montage. He prints all of his work himself in his studio.

Artist Statement

“Since 1990 I have worked in the medium of digital montage — Combining primarily elements of photography as well as painting, drawing, and scanned materials. The techniques I use foster and give form to intriguing ambiguities, reexamining the boundaries of mixed media and creating altered realities that merge into images rich in symbolism both personal and archetypal. It is not my intention to school the viewer or place before them a fully resolved work that is clear in message, but rather to invite or draw them into an emotional connection, a recognition and unfolding of their own inner experience and understanding. Something akin to finding a unique feeling or emotion that is truly their own. That is the completion of the work.”

Rooms at the Edge

–– Deborah Weisgall

A diffuse, bleaching light illuminates Jeffery Becton’s images of rooms. They are two-dimensional dioramas, perched on the edge somewhere between land and ocean. You can almost smell the salty wind through the open doors. These are dream interiors promising peace and refuge, places out of time.

Beyond Mainestream

–– Peter Plagens

It isn’t what you do / It’s the way how you do it / It ain’t what you eat / It’s the way how you treat it.                    —“Little Richard” Penniman
 
Many more people than I have wondered whether photography hasn’t—in a phrase that seems appropriate in regard to an artist living and working in Maine—swum away from the dock. The medium used to offer a kind of guarantee that, no matter how much fiddling the artist did during the exposure, cropping, and printing, a core of physical and narrative truth always remained. That is, some configuration of the material world had once stood in front of the camera’s lens and caused light to fall upon the film in a certain way and acted, in the pioneer nineteenth-century photographer William Fox Talbot’s words, as “the pencil of nature.”