Reflections of memory: Beau Carey climbs the mountains of his mind in Richard Levy Gallery exhibit

Beau Carey paints mountains with memory.

The Albuquerque artist has completed residencies in the Arctic and Alaska. He based nine new oil on canvas paintings at Richard Levy Gallery on repetition and memory, fracturing and inverting the geometry of peaks and valleys. The show will hang through Saturday, July 13.

“Nameless Mountain” gestated with a snow-capped peak while Carey was in a 2012 residency in Norway. The artist combined that memory with the Buddhist practice of kasina meditation.

Reflections of memory: Beau Carey climbs the mountains of his mind in Richard Levy Gallery exhibit

With kasina, the practitioner concentrates on the breath, an emotion or an object, Carey explained.

“Traditionally, people use candle flames,” he said. “At the same time, I’m trying to remember this experience. It kept shifting and changing.”

He first glimpsed the peak from a tall ship on the coast of Norway.

“The water was clear and glassy and there was this magical quality,” Carey said. “This peak came slowly into view.”

But the reverie was interrupted when a shipmate became ill and the ship had to turn around. Soon a helicopter arrived to take the patient to the hospital. After all the drama, Carey couldn’t find the peak again.

“It’s been haunting me ever since,” he said.

He tried painting the mountain from each direction.

“The more I tried to grasp this memory, it strayed farther and farther away. It was this cognitive dissonance.”

He tried meditating on the mountain.

“At the same time, I’m trying to remember this experience, it kept shifting and changing,” Carey said. “It’s about the ephemeral quality when we see anything.”

In “Mountain,” Carey painted a single peak with the moon at its crest. By the time he produced “New, Full, Day, Night,” multiple peaks layer and jut across the canvas as the moon and sun hover in the center. By the time he painted “Old Path,” he had created a mirror image.

“Fire Kasina” turned into a collage of triangles and squares in vibrant shades of reds, pinks and purples. “Yellow Kasina” preceded it.

“The reflections aren’t perfect,” Carey said. “I love it. I love the fallibility of memory.”

Carey earned his master’s degree at the University of New Mexico before moving to Denver. The residencies followed. When he was in Denali National Park and Preserve, he saw the northern lights and used a wood burning stove in 25 degrees below freezing.

His family had nurtured the artist in him.

“My mother was a huge encouragement,” Carey said. “She never used to give me coloring books; she made me use my imagination. What a gift.

“I am constantly in awe that I get to call myself an artist, given the community here.”

In the summer of 2015, Beau was one of five artists to be in residence on Rabbit Island in Lake Superior. Working both at remote locations in the field and at home in the studio, his work explores historical and contemporary issues surrounding landscape painting and land use. He is a founding member of Denver’s Tank Studios.