Jeffery Becton

Jeffery Becton Biography

Inspired by the tidal reaches and atmospheric weather near his Deer Isle home and the summer homes on the Blue Hill Peninsula, creates provocative photo-based digital montages, often playing with the borders between dream and reality, interior and exterior, abstraction and representation. His montages frequently contain architectural elements and objects from these vintage New England houses, many of which are part of his personal history.

Jeffery Becton (b.1947) is a pioneer in fine-art photography, Becton received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1976. Here he worked on the mainframe computer at Yale’s computer science lab—an experience that primed Becton to welcome the new digital tools in the mid-1980s. By the early 1990s, Becton was experimenting with the layering of visual information, living in year-round in Maine, and creating surreal scenarios evocative of that in-between milieu one inhabits when living by the sea. Becton’s work has been in numerous solo, group, and juried exhibitions, and has been highlighted in national and international publications, including the Royal Academy 2022 Summer Exhibition in London. In 2015, Marshall Wilkes (Ellsworth) published a monograph on Becton’s work, and in 2016, the Bates College Museum of Art held a solo exhibition of Becton’s large-scale monographs that traveled to Tennessee, Florida, and Virginia. Becton’s work is included in the museum collections of Bates College Museum of Art, Farnsworth Museum of Art, and Portland Museum of Art. Becton lives in Deer Isle, Maine, where he maintains a studio.

“Becton’s works are meditations on ambivalence: digital montages, beautiful and unsettling mashups, altered realities. . . .Walls, floors, and ceilings open to the elements–and to the imagination. They provide a framework but no shelter; they are lit with the clarity of memory. What we see depends on what we bring to the act of seeing: what memories, what desires, what emotions. Becton is really exploring our own permeability.”

—Deborah Weisgall, Jeffery Becton: The Farthest House

Fine Art Printing on Aluminum  Becton uses an archival fine art printing technique called dye-sublimation to print his photomontages. Each print is carefully proofed by Becton to guarantee the quality of the artwork. The image is first printed onto a transfer paper using inkjet technology, and adhered to a pre-treated sheet of aluminum. The dyes are then infused into the aluminum via heat transfer. Once the dyes submerge underneath the surface, the process is complete and permanent. The prints are archival for up to 65+ years, and tested by Wilhelm imaging research. These semi-gloss fine art aluminum prints retain excellence color density and have minimal glare, so no glass is needed.

White Wood Framing  Becton’s aluminum prints are handsomely floated in a Custom Wood Shadow Box with a 3.5 reveal, or a Wood Float Frame with a .25 inch reveal. No glass is used, giving the prints a tactile presence.

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