Returning to the Fair: Kathleen Beausoleil at The Painting Center
I have photographs of myself at the Topsfield Fair going back to when I was a baby. Looking at them now, I can trace a life through visits to the same annual event: the giant pumpkins, the rides, the competitions, the particular anticipation of returning. This October, I will go again. But before traveling home to New England, I found myself thinking about those visits while walking through Kathleen Beausoleil’s Meet at the Ferris Wheel at The Painting Center.
Beausoleil’s paintings brought back the feeling of moving through a fair at the hour when daylight begins to give way to electric light. Everything seems briefly heightened. Pink and violet spread across the sky, illuminated rides become more extravagant, and the evening still feels full of possibility. Her paintings catch that transition with an attention to color that makes even a familiar attraction feel newly strange.
In Held By Evening, a swing ride opens across the sky like an enormous magenta flower. Its decorated canopy dominates the small panel, while suspended riders sweep outward on thin chains. Below them, figures pass through the foreground, their bodies more firmly weighted than the fleeting silhouettes overhead. Dots of pale paint register as bulbs around the canopy and down the central column. Broad strokes of blue and lavender keep the sky active, giving the machinery something luminous to turn against. The scene has the disproportion I remember from childhood, when a ride could seem to occupy the whole world.
Elsewhere, Beausoleil steps back far enough to show where that world ends. In the panoramic Suburban Stage, the fair sits beside an ordinary residential street. Houses, utility wires, parked vehicles, and dark trees remain visible beyond the concentrated brightness of the midway. A purple railing curves into the right foreground, placing the viewer somewhere above the crowd, as though looking out from another attraction. Below, visitors thread between booths and rides.
That proximity between spectacle and everyday life is one of the painting’s most compelling details. People live across the road from this abundance of light and motion. The fair has temporarily rearranged the neighborhood, making an occasion out of a place that will soon resume its ordinary routines. Beausoleil gives enough space to the surrounding houses and gathering dusk for us to feel both conditions at once.
The smaller paintings allow that descriptive precision to loosen. In The Meeting Spot and Center of it All, people emerge from brief strokes of color, their bodies recognizable without becoming fully resolved. Faces recede; a stance, a gap between figures, or a cluster of heads carries the scene. At this scale, the marks keep shifting between paint and people. Looking becomes a process of finding someone in a crowd, then losing them again.
In Come On, an exchange between two young figures brings that search into focus. Beneath a Ferris wheel that fills much of the sky, a girl turns back toward a boy in a yellow shirt, extending an arm in his direction. Her glance and gesture give the scene its momentum. The wheel is immense, but the small question of whether one person will follow another holds my attention.
Their relationship is unspecified. They could be siblings, friends, or a young couple. I found myself remembering the years when going to Topsfield began to mean something different: childhood outings with my parents giving way to teenage crushes, dates, and the possibility of a romantic moment among the rides. The attractions were familiar, but who I hoped to see there could change the entire evening. Beausoleil’s painting leaves enough unspoken for that memory to enter without making it the figures’ only possible story.
The fair’s pleasures also change with its light. Flare compresses a gathering beneath the cropped structure of a Ferris wheel, bathing figures in reds, oranges, and deep burgundy. With little open sky to relieve the composition, the atmosphere feels close and charged. Bodies overlap, and distinctions between people soften in the saturated color. There is excitement here, but also the slight disorientation of being surrounded by movement after dark. The painting gives the exhibition a welcome friction: festivity can be absorbing, even overwhelming.
I kept returning, though, to Still. A figure reclines on the grass in the foreground, knees raised, while a crowd gathers farther back beneath towering rides. An expanse of green separates this resting body from the activity beyond. Overhead, the sky moves through pale violet, yellow, and peach.nThe figure’s posture is familiar enough to invite recognition without supplying a story. They might be tired, waiting, or simply enjoying a pause. Beausoleil leaves that uncertainty intact. The fair continues around them, and their stillness feels entirely possible within it. This is where the exhibition most clearly accommodates a private experience inside a public occasion.
For me, that pause opened onto the peculiar doubleness of returning to a place associated with childhood. I still go to Topsfield with my parents, now increasingly aware of their growing older and of what it means that we can continue to enjoy it together. The photographs accumulate, and the people in them change. I hope, in time, to bring a family of my own. Perhaps we will find another fair and begin a tradition elsewhere, but I would love to bring them here, to the place my parents first brought me.
My attachment lives in small details: pumpkins judged for their size, children’s decorated entries, the hopeful attempt to win a prize. These things can sound inconsequential until you consider how long people carry them. An annual visit gives memory a recurring setting. As I looked at Beausoleil’s paintings, childhood excitement, adolescent longing, and the wish to share these pleasures with another generation felt close together.
Her paintings are most persuasive when they leave room for those differences in experience. The elevated view of Suburban Stage, the backward glance in Come On, the press of bodies in Flare, and the resting figure in Still offer distinct ways of inhabiting the same kind of event. Together, they resist the assumption that everyone in a crowd is having the same evening.
I welcomed their beauty, too. At a moment when the news often makes sustained attention feel exhausting, it was a pleasure to linger over a violet sky or a string of painted lights. Yet the paintings held me through their quieter intervals as much as their brightness. The figure on the grass stays with me: resting within reach of the crowd, beneath rides that continue to turn. When I return to Topsfield this year, I suspect I will notice those pauses more carefully.
Kathleen Beausoleil: Meet at the Ferris Wheel is open through October 24, 2026, at The Painting Center, 547 W 27th St, Suite 500, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10001.
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