A traveling exhibit of 36 years of artwork by recently deceased painter Rosemarie Beck opened at Western Carolina University last week.

“Rosemarie Beck: Paintings 1965-2001,” will be on view in the gallery of Belk Building through Oct. 17. The memorial exhibition is the first since Beck’s death in New York on July 15.

A figurative painter who also was an influential teacher, Beck is known for vigorous and colorful work inspired by mythological and musical concerns, according to Patricia Bailey, associate professor of art at Western.

In the early part of her career, she was regarded as a member of the second generation of the New York School of abstract expressionists and her work was often exhibited at their annual shows at the Stable and Peridot galleries.

“But Beck never really considered herself an abstract expressionist, and by the late 1950s, she had switched to the figurative focus that she would retain for the rest of her career,” Bailey said.

Beck described her transition this way: “The ore in my abstract veins had thinned. I thought I would nourish my abstract painting by painting subjects. Then I couldn’t go back. I must have been a secret realist all along because I had never stopped drawing from life.”

Beck became “one of the few painters of our time to treat grand themes in ambitious multi-figure compositions while satisfying a need both for abstract structure and for an execution that embodies energy without being gratuitous,” according to critic Martica Sawin.

A graduate of Oberlin College with a bachelor’s degree in art history, Beck studied at Columbia University, the Art Students League in New York, The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and in workshops with well-known artists Kurt Seligman and Robert Motherwell. Shortly after graduating from Oberlin in 1944, she moved to Woodstock, N.Y., where she struck up friendships with neighbors Philip Guston and Bradley Walker Tomlin, artists who had an influence on her early work.

Beck taught at Queens College of New York, Vassar College, Middlebury College, the Vermont Studio Center, and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, where she was on the faculty until shortly before she died.

Beck was married to the writer and editor Robert Phelps.

Belk gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information, call 828.227.3881.