The Hockaday Museum of Art’s new exhibit “Looking at the Landscape: The Work of Dale Beckman and Richard Thompson” showcases the work of two artists who interpret the rural landscape with unique perspectives.

Dale Beckman creates ethereal landscapes of abstract realism, which illustrate a non-physical character of reality.

Beckman’s Makoshika series was painted from photographs taken at Makoshika State Park near Glendive. His work suggests the wind and water that shape the Montana Badlands, using pattern and line to suggest that composition is more energy than matter, while showing the multiple dimensions of landscape that co-exist.

Born in Forsyth, Montana, in 1955, Beckman graduated from Rocky Mountain College in Billings and did his post-graduate work at the University of Montana-Billings. He later moved to New Mexico. In 2014, he was awarded a grant by the Myrna Loy Foundation to help fund the creation of a body of paintings of the Badlands of eastern Montana. His works have been exhibited both at the Myrna Loy Center in Helena and Dawson College in Glendive, home to Makoshika State Park. Beckman’s work has also been exhibited in galleries in New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah and across Montana.

Richard Thompson paints the essence of the rural American landscape from his family’s old homestead in the Willamette Valley, near Dayton, Oregon, where he was raised. A third-generation Oregonian, Thompson, 75, grew up in and now lives in the same home where his father and grandfather lived. He’s as connected to the landscape and the community that surrounds the old family farm as one can get.

Having spent many hours several years ago behind the wheel traversing America from his then home of upstate New York to Oregon to help care for his father, he began to see the flat expanses inherent in the rural countryside as a modern abstract painting — the horizon, the crisscrossing of the roads, the clusters of farms.

“It was the first time I had been away from my studio in a long time,” Thompson said. “I had time to reflect, regroup. I was doing more thinking, more writing.”

Back in his studio in 2006, Thompson was inspired to paint both the contrast and harmony of the rural American landscape as he had experienced it on those cross-country trips.

“That was the door I walked through,” Thompson said. Landscape has been his work’s primary focus ever since.

Painted in bright blocks of color, his paintings express the agricultural landscape of the West geometrically. The two-dimensional patterns of fields and farms, barns, intersecting country roads, billowy clouds scudding across the horizon and distant mountains seem laid out on a tabletop, organized into a big contemporary still life.

As its title suggests, the images in Thompson’s Patchwork Prairies series, several of which will be on display for the Hockaday exhibit, seem to be quilted together in each painting.

Thompson began painting in the 1960s, when painting rural America wasn’t hip.

“We were encouraged then to have slightly more cosmopolitan ambitions,” he said.

The teachers who influenced him were children of the Depression and what they were able to bring to the studio classroom was a true appreciation for the visual arts — which was a recent post-World War II addition to American culture.

“They taught us, as with freedom of speech, that being an artist in America was important,” he said. “And with it came a commitment to building a community, a responsibility that we had to job to do to bring the artistic experience to all Americans, that visual arts were a big deal.”

Thompson himself taught for 30 years as dean of the School of Art and Design at Alfred University in New York and as a professor of painting at the University of Texas at Austin. He loved his teaching years and misses it.

“I was blessed with that great work ethic my own teachers shared,” he said. “We were taught to share information with the next generation.

“But as you gain your confidence you come back home to what you need to do.

“The artist peels away what’s right in front of their nose — and they do it slowly.

“You often only hint at things you’re not able to say directly. You have to come to it, to be ready.”

Aware that in his daily life and his art the rural America of today is much more complex than its setting might suggest, Thompson approaches his work without nostalgia.

“Living here now is to be living on the cutting edge of changes in American society,” he affirmed, “but it’s still a place of farms and agriculture.”

What he does want his art to do is to have the viewer feel its quiet, the way the rural landscape is quiet.

“When I’m in museums I’m struck by work that absorbs sound, that is contemplative, meditative,” he said. “We’re dominated culturally by things characterized by how loud they are, how big a splash they make. My paintings aren’t action. I want the viewer to be pulled in, to absorb the moment.

“People often respond first to the color in my work; I want them to hear the wind blow.”

Thompson’s work has been exhibited in the Smithsonian, numerous high-profile exhibitions across the country and is in a long and impressive list of permanent collections in the United States and abroad.

“The beauty of a painting is that it was made by hand, by a human being who stood there for as long as it took and used ancient technology to make a work of art — and there lies that quiet moment of reflection. What I value is the peace, the stillness in our lives.”

“For me, working with the American landscape is coming home,” Thompson said. “This is what I’ve been thinking about my whole life.”