Cool Beans

Cool Beans is an acrylic on canvas from 2010 that typifies Walt Viviers' interest in elevating the overlooked. The subject — bean pods splitting open at full ripeness — is rendered with a macro painter's eye: Viviers moves in close and fills the canvas with split husks and exposed seeds, working in a palette of earthy ochres, warm browns and flashes of rose pink and cream. The composition has an almost muscular density; the pods push against one another across the picture plane with a sense of natural abundance that borders on the excessive. There is humour here too — the title carries the knowing lightness of a phrase well past its peak — but the painting itself is serious in its craft, with visible texture and confident layering throughout. Cool Beans sits in the tradition of artists who find real material richness in botanical and everyday subject matter, and demonstrates that Viviers can bring the same force and intention to the natural world as he does to figurative work.