CHRISTOPHER BENSON

Christopher Benson

I was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1960, and grew up in nearby Newport. From 1975 to 1979 I attended the Woodstock Country School in South Woodstock, Vermont. WCS was an alternative, arts-friendly boarding school, founded in the 1940s by a former student and teacher from the famous Black Mountain School. This background gave the place a strong affinity for the arts and humanities. Sadly, it closed forever in 1981.

At WCS, I took a rigorous two-year studio course in oil painting and art history with Peter Devine, a realist painter who had recently transitioned from abstraction, but yet retained a strong modernist sensibility. After graduating, I enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I continued to focus on painting. Unhappy in an increasingly conceptual painting department, I withdrew from the program at the end of my junior year and moved to New York City. I studied independently there until 1985 when I returned to Rhode Island. In 1988, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where I had some of the first commercial gallery exhibitions of my oil paintings....

Christopher Benson: The Middle Place

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While living in New Mexico I took a trip to California, were I met Cybele Leverett, the daughter of a family friend. She was just leaving for the east to attend college, and eventually I followed her there to live again in Newport while she attended Brown University in Providence. When she graduated in 1993, we moved together to her hometown of Berkeley, in California. We were married there in '94 and had our first son, William, in '97. We lived in Berkeley for seven years then moved back to Rhode Island in 2000. Our second son, Fisher was born there in 2001.

I exhibited in Silicon Valley and San Francisco from 2004 until 2007, when Cybele and I both re-enrolled at college in Rhode Island — she to get a Master's degree, again at Brown, and I to complete my previously abandoned BFA at RISD. After completing our degrees, we moved back to Santa Fe in 2006. We have lived in New Mexico now for 13 years.

I have exhibited in galleries in the southwest and on both coasts for over 30 years. I am a two-time recipient of the Pollock-Krasner painting fellowship grant, and have work in private and museum collections throughout the United States.

- Christopher Benson

Grants and Fellowships

2001-2002—The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Painting Fellowship
2016-2017—The Pollock Krasner Foundation, Painting Fellowship

Collections

MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art), New York, NY
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND
The Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI
Baker University, Holt Russell Gallery, Baldwin City, KS
Stanford University Libraries, Special Collections, Stanford, CA
The Redwood Library and Athenaeum, Newport, RI
The Rhode Island School of Design Special Collections Library, Providence, RI
Duke University School of Law (Portrait of Dean David Levi)
Stanford University School of Law (Portrait of Dean John Ely)
Stanford University School of Aeronautics and Aviation, (Portrait of Dean Nicholas Hoff)

Education

1975-1979—The Woodstock Country School, South Woodstock, Vermont (Studied painting with Peter Devine)
1979-1982—RISD, Painting
2004-2005—RISD, BFA Painting

Press

The Providence Journal, 2017
Whats Up Newp, 2017
The Huffington Post, 2014
New American Paintings, 2014
THE Magazine, Critical Reflections (P.63), 2014
THE Magazine, Critical Reflections (P.54), 2013
Art News, summer issue, regional reviews, 2012
Pasatiempo Magazine of the Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe, NM, 2012
The Printed Picture, MoMA, New York, NY, 2008
Art New England, regional reviews, 2004
The Albuquerque Journal North, 1992

Installation images

Installation images

About the paintings

I make pictures of a lot of different things. Sometimes I paint seascapes, sometimes landscapes or street scenes. Occasionally, I set figures in interiors or other architectural spaces. Some of these pictures are taken from things I saw directly. Others are conjured from memory, or from an accumulated compendium of internalized views.

But whether literally representational or imagined, I mean for all of my pictures to invite the viewer in with a sense of the familiar, while yet distilling some essential character of the subject that may feel surprising or even a bit odd. I find that I can achieve this by stripping out a great deal of extraneous detail in order to get to the boiled-down, or even abstract heart of a picture.

Beyond all those formal concerns and matters of content, what interests me most is paint itself: how it lies, stands or races across the surface of the canvas. I've said to a couple of friends recently that "I want to make de Koonings and hide them inside of Homers". Not that I mean to imitate either of those artists — I just like to conceal the physically powerful wolf of abstraction within the sheep's clothing of a more seemingly conventional realism. You feel that you know it, or have seen it before a thousand times. But then you spend some time with it and realize that you don't know it at all.

A kind of deliberate brusqueness is the crucial agent of my mark-making, which is intentionally raw and roughly drawn. I have lost any interest in carefully rendering the minutia of fine detail, if indeed I ever had it to begin with. Large descriptive shapes, made with a loaded brush and moved by the whole arm, are what I'm after. The sense of atmosphere and emotion that those big gestures can convey is what I live for.

— Christopher Benson