Beverly Acha
Circular Ruins
ON VIEW
APRIL 17 — MAY 30, 2026
Conversation between
Beverly Acha and fellow painter Kristy Luck
APRIL 17 — MAY 30, 2026
Conversation between
Beverly Acha and fellow painter Kristy Luck
Beverly Acha: I started a series of small 8 by 10 inch paintings that I called “the broken clocks” as I worked on them. That was in the summer of 2025, when I was a resident at MacDowell in New Hampshire. They came from playing around, and I started to see shapes that were kind of like clock faces — they all had a circular compositional beginning. That fall I had to teach, and I was finishing a big public art commission I'd been working on for two years, so I didn't return to the show until that winter.
When I went back to the little clocks I was back in my New York studio. I listen to audiobooks a lot in the studio, usually ones that tap into things I’m already thinking about in the work. One was The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger — a popular science book about how plants sense the world around them, how they understand time, biologically. I also listened to The Human Cosmos by Jo Marchant, which maps how our understanding of time has been linked to looking up at the stars— that it started with a connection to earth's time and cycles. She traces that across cultures and civilizations and through the development of technology. This book struck a chord with my longstanding desire to feel connected to the natural world and had me asking myself: Why do I care about this? What is my experience of time? Why am I obsessed with these symbols and methods of timekeeping? Before these clocks I’d worked with the hourglass form in an earlier body of work.
The title came later, from remembering Borges' book of short stories Fictions — I've always loved it. He talks about infinity as a concept for time within narrative, or really shows it through his narrative. I reread The Circular Ruins toward the end of finishing the work for the show, and I couldn't get the title out of my head. Borges is referring to the architectural ruins of ancient civilizations, the story takes place in a circular ruin, but the title made me think about time, the clock face as a kind of ruin. Or time itself being a kind of ruin. What is the relationship between circularity and ruin? Is it limiting or is it expansive? Is it a kind of infiniteness?
I don't have answers, but I’m interested in really thinking about how we use and experience our time on earth. In a philosophical and spiritual sense — what is it we are doing, as someone who feels constantly pushed by society and economic and political reasons toward productivity, and toward that being what creates meaning in one's life.
These books took me down a rabbit hole — I didn't realize that the clocks on our phones and computers are now based on measuring atomic vibrations. It's such an accurate time-keeping method, only loosing 1 second over 300 million years. We're all synced to the same time, no error. I find that bizarre — that accuracy compared to how fallible we are, how human experience of time is so in opposition to it.
KL: It seems strange that it would exist outside of our recognizable experience. I’ve got to take that in.
BA: In a way I felt this desire for the clocks failing — analog clocks do lose time. That's part of what I think that little series is. There's something I like about that. When I think about my experience of time, living, it is so complex, so not linear. The way that memory enters into the present moment is interesting to me. These philosophical interests get filtered into my work along the way, but they're so unstable. They're abstractions too.
KL: We first met at Lighthouse Works in 2017. You'd just come from Roswell — a year in the New Mexico desert — and you said you spent a lot of that year making routines. I remember that work being kind of celestial. On Fishers Island, you were working systematically with color, building transparencies, doing tests. Your studio always felt precise and scientific, and I can see the result of that in your current show. How has your research developed since then?
BA: At Lighthouse Works I was teaching myself color theory. I wanted to create a feeling of space in my work, a feeling that there was an influence of light in a space. I'd pre-mix all my colors into gradients — either a value-only shift, or a shift in hue, or a shift in saturation. I didn't even understand how those three things interacted at the time. I was figuring it out. But I wanted my paintings to have a sense of space — to be able to create deep space, to say that something has an edge, that something sits in relationship to something else, as though the things I'm painting are actually physical entities. I didn't want to have to look at anything from direct observation to do it. I wanted to understand how you make the illusion of that through color, because that's what it allows us to do in painting.
Now it comes a lot more intuitively. I know what to reach for to make the shift I want to see happen. This work plays a lot with that — to create a sense of one environment existing separate from another within a painting, that something's contained by a shape, and outside of it is a different kind of air, a different quality of light.
My interest in understanding color has continued. I have this love of saturated, synthetic colors — Quinacridones, I love. They're almost always mixed into something. In this show, I used a lot of earth tones for the first time — Mars colors mixed into those, which really shifted my palette. Things were always operating within the painting at such a high saturation that they were almost hard to look at on the wall. It was interesting to temper them.
KL: The Mars colors, the earthy tones — that makes sense with your interest in ruins, things breaking down into the ground. And since you've done a lot of residencies in distinct landscapes — Roswell, Fishers Island, you're from Miami — how does place play a role in your painting?
BA: For a long time, since Roswell, every body of work felt like a response to place. The landscape in Roswell was so different from anywhere I'd spent time. And the amount of time I had to focus on my work, to be aware of my own responses, in a quiet, rural place with very few distractions — it gave me so much time to observe, and to notice what I was observing.
There I became hyper aware of the way the earth spun, because you could really see it. The landscape was so flat and so dry — you could see the whole dome of the sky and hundreds of miles into the distance. How do you speak to that in a painting? Can a painting hold two views at once? Can it have what's on the east and on the west? How do you make a painting that shows the sun, the earth turning — this phenomenon of light we call the sunset that is a still image versus the dimensional physical experience I'd never seen before?
After Fishers Island, I went to UC Davis to teach, then Ohio for a year, then Maine for a summer residency, then Texas, and Miami. At each place, the color in my work shifted to match the quality of the light. It happened intuitively at first — the colors I was mixing would slowly shift. All the work I made in Ohio had these super chromatic grays. Toward the end of my time there, I realized: that's what I see all the time, there's so much cloud cover. Everything is a soft box — that ambient, glowing light, no direction, no harsh shadows.
That shifted when I moved to New York in 2021. I become much more internal in urban space. Horizons are blocked, you can't see out, so I turn inward. A lot of the work I've made in New York has been about an idea of something, or my processes have changed — I set up parameters for the work. One painting I treated like an exquisite corpse — blocked off parts, worked on them at different times, then dealt with the outcome of this problem I'd created of a very unresolved composition. As someone who thinks a lot about how what I'm painting fits into the rectangle — I want it to feel like it's containing something — to start by subverting that desire for control was really exciting. I wouldn't have done that somewhere else.
I think of Lois Dodd's paintings. I feel like I'm engaging with the environment around me, but not by painting what I see — these fleeting moments she's captured so poetically. My impulse feels quite similar in some ways. KL: I know you're not an observational painter. How did you arrive at being an abstract painter? Is there an origin story?
BA: No, I'm not an observational painter — but the role of observation is essential to the work I make. It comes out of a sensitivity to what I observe, but a desire to say something else with it. Abstraction is present alongside the namable, in the realm of the felt or sensed. Sometimes I think about my painting almost like a lens to see something you can't see otherwise. Something that exists but isn't physical, or can't be seen in any direct way. About multiple things at once. Simultaneity. It's impossible, but it's real. In this body of work, there's been a shift to symbol — to thinking about how symbol holds, instead of place holding the space for these observations to exist within.
The first time I really felt a relationship to abstraction was in my sophomore year of undergrad when I saw a performance of John Cage's 4'33" — this is the performance about silence, where the musician doesn't play anything for three minutes and forty-four seconds. But, I didn't know anything about John Cage or the work at the time, so I experienced with without context or expectations. It was so moving. Suddenly what I understood to be my context in that moment was completely shifted — the expectation of the musician making sound was superseded by all the sound that was already in my environment that I hadn't been paying attention to. All that “silence” was incredibly loud.
I didn't know that art could do that, could change my perspective of my own experience in such a way. Even though I don't think I had the language for it when I saw that work, it felt like that's where there was meaning. And that it was something not super nameable — about multiple contexts colliding. I didn't know that an artist could create space for that other thing to happen, something not in their direct control.
I keep seeking and finding things like that, that end up being the inspiration for a lot of the work — the place where I like spending time. Time has ended up being that for this body of work. You can't hold onto it. It means different things at different times, like poetry.
KL: Yeah, at the limits of the human mind — whatever's at the limits of human cognition. What are your obsessions outside of painting? Any influences that might surprise us, or secrets in the process or imagery you'd want to share?
BA: Something I've never actually talked about is the influence of meditation on my life and art practice. I learned how to meditate in 2018. It transformed my relationship to myself and my experience. For instance, I hadn't realized you can hear and feel your heartbeat keeping time if you're quiet enough. The sense of peace that's possible through meditation, even in our chaotic world, was really aligned with what happens to me when I'm in the studio. When I paint, I'm totally focused in the present moment responding to decisions fluidly, I could describe it as almost watching myself make decisions— it's a very similar experience. I didn't know that I could access that state of being directly without creating anything. Meditation has had a huge influence on my understanding of why certain processes and ways of working are so central to my creative practice. The studio has always felt like a space of freedom a space to think and investigate openly, broadly, in zig zags even, a space to follow whatever arises.
I often try to honor that meandering way subjects and ideas arise and develop in my work through the titles. Something I didn’t mention in response to your first question was that titles pretty much always come at the end, after the work is finished, but sometimes along the way there are words or places that get attached to certain paintings.
I started Echoes of Time (Cunningham Pond Swims) in 2019 when I went to MacDowell for the first time. I went swimming almost every single day in Cunningham Pond with a couple other residents — we were the little swim team that summer – a poet, a playwright, and me. As someone from Miami, I like the ocean — I’ve always thought of ponds and lakes as mucky. But this water was incredible, it made me fall in love with lake swimming. In any case, what was incredible was that trees surrounded the pond, so the reflection on the surface was dark, then you'd get pockets of reflections of the clouds, the sky, and the sun glittering like coins. I'd swim every day and look at the changing colors of the wavy surface, and in the last weeks of my residency I made this painting in a fury, I wanted to finish it before leaving but couldn’t. I thought was terrible and unfinished and I put it away in storage.
I went back to MacDowell in the summer of 2025, and when I went swimming again, it dawned on me that it was 100% a pond painting — the surface of the pond painting. Sometimes there are paintings that operate this way for me — they are of a very specific moment or experience, and I'm not conscious of it until I have some distance from it, until time has passed. I pulled it out of storage after the summer. It was a painting about time, bracketing this period between 2019 and 2025.
The way I work, there's so much that’s layered before I get to the final composition — so many decisions tried. I work on everything in the studio simultaneously, and what I want the painting to be is changing as the painting is being made, and as those around it are being made. The painting has all this time compressed in it, and then it's a static thing at the end. I like that it has all those contradictions and fluidity. This painting feels like it did all of that with very few working sessions — probably twenty hours total. A big spurt of time at MacDowell, a smaller spurt to finish it. All the time it sat untouched in between is what led it to be finished.
KL: It's honoring the aliveness of the process. The person who lives with the painting will change too — how they look at it will change. That aliveness continues through the interaction.
BA: I would hope so. I suppose this has happened for me revisiting paintings in museums. I never really liked Mondrian’s work but I’d look at his paintings every time I went to MoMA. Then one day I walked up to Broadway Boogie Woogie and was like, oh my god, I see the way the color vibrates and creates a rhythmic movement. I feel it. I think I had to make certain paintings before I could understand it.
KL: I don’t know if you’d remember this, but one time at the residency on Fishers Island, we watched the sunset together on the edge of the beach and tried to name the colors: what color is that cloud? It kept changing because of the different layers of atmosphere, the sun behind it shifting.
BA: I had forgotten about that! But, yes I remember, I was really trying to understand that. The deep looking. What about that feels so important? I think there’s something about an instability or a wonder. When there's wonder about something, it destabilizes what we think we know.
KL: It's unpinnable. It edges on — I don't know whether that's categorized as spiritual or psychological — but it's what helps us get out of bed. Logic can really break your heart.
BA: It does to me.