On Christmas Day 1956, Joseph A. Becker was born with an innate gift. By God’s grace, this talent continues to unfold. It began to appear early on, even to the interests of the Famous Artist School in Connecticut. As a representative of that school noted, it was extremely rare to enroll a student at age 14.
Amid youthful influences, Joe especially sites his father’s colored chalk illustrations for Sunday School classes. He explains, “Then after church, we’d go to Grand-pa’s cottage, along the Conowago Creek.” From those impressionable years, he points to Hurricane Agnes in 1972. “Near to the cottage, I had found a mud-covered cache of Grumbacher oils, left from the flood. That discovery coincided with the correspondence course very well.”
He graduated ‘Most artistic’ in the Class of 1974, with several Scholastic Achievement awards. However, without any art scholarship program yet in place, he received no formal art degree. Still determined to create original paintings, he managed local one-man shows while freelancing for various state and national outdoor magazines. Typically, those works displayed a flair for fishing articles.
Later, following a poorly attended gallery exhibition in 1988, he shunned the prospect of any real painting career. Dejected, he took a leave from his painting, which spanned several formidable years. Then in 1992, from the depth of bereavement, Joe recalls how God prompted him back to the easel, and to the most serious painting he can ever do. From within the fulfilled promise of God to draw near to us (James 4:8), there came this response: “I want to paint your (The Father’s) Love for me” was his vow.
Solomon’s Porch was conceived. Amid a prayer vigil in 1996, his art was both revived and sanctified to the point and purpose of God’s Word, Spirit and Will to be alive and active in the affairs of the artist. And so, within the unfolding, there is a profound resemblance to the call of Jesus for this disciple to become a ‘fisher of men’. “The experience of understanding the Love of God through Messiah has become all that is worthy of paint anymore.”